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BODY AND MIND: 



AN INQUIRY INTO THEIR CONNECTION AND MUTUAL 

INFLUENCE, SPECIALLY IN REFERENCE 

TO MENTAL DISORDERS. 



BEING THE 

GTJLSTONIAN LECTURES FOR 1870, 

DELIVERED BEFORE THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS. 

WITH APPENDIX. 

BY 

HENRY MAUDSLEY, M. D., Lond., 

FELLOW OF THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS J 

PROFESSOR OF MEDICAL JURISPRUDENCE IN UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON J 

PRESIDENT-ELECT OF THE MEDICO-PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION; 

HONORARY MEMBER OF THE MEDICO-PSYCHOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF PARIS, 

OF THE IMPERIAL SOCIETY OF PHYSICIANS OF VIENNA, AND OF THE SOCIETY FOR THE 

PROMOTION OF PSYCHIATRY AND FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGY OF VIENNA. 
FORMERLY RESIDENT PHYSICIAN OF THE MANCHESTER ROYAL LUNATIC HOSPITAL, ETC. 



NEW YORK : 
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, 

90, 92 & 94 GRAND STREET. 

1871. 



- - n 



By transfer 
The Unite House, 



PEEFACE. 



The three lectures forming the first part of this 
volume were delivered before the Royal College of 
Physicians of London, to which I had the honor of 
being appointed Gulstonian Lecturer for this year; 
the latter part consists of two articles which, having 
appeared elsewhere, are reprinted here as presenting a 
completer view of some points that are only touched 
upon in the lectures; and the general plan of the 
whole, as thus constituted, may be described as being 
to bring man, both in his physical and mental rela- 
tions, as much as possible within the scope of scientific 
inquiry. 

The first lecture is devoted to a general survey of 
the Physiology of Mind — to an exposition of the phys- 
ical conditions of mental function in health. In the 
second lecture are sketched the features of some forms 
of degeneracy of mind, as exhibited in morbid varieties 
of the human kind, with the purpose of bringing 
prominently into notice the operation of physical 



iv PREFACE. 

causes from generation to generation, and the rela- 
tionship of mental to other disorders of the nervous 
system. In the third lecture, which contains a gen- 
eral survey of the pathology of mind, are displayed 
the relations of morbid states of the body to disor- 
dered mental function. I would fain believe the gen- 
eral result to be a well-warranted conclusion that, 
whatever theories may be held concerning mind and 
the best method of its study, it is vain to expect, and 
a folly to attempt, to rear a stable fabric of mental 
science, without taking faithful account of physiologi- 
cal and pathological inquiries into its phenomena. 

In the criticism of the " Limits of Philosophical 
Inquiry," which follows the lectures, will be found 
reasons why no attempt has been made to discuss the 
bearing of the views broached in them on any system 
of philosophy. Neither materialism nor spiritualism 
are scientific terms, and one need have no concern 
with them in a scientific inquiry, which, if it be true 
to its spirit, is bound to have regard only to what lies 
within its powers and to the truth of its results. It 
would seem to be full time that vague and barren 
disputations concerning materialism and spiritualism 
should end, and that, instead of continuing such fruit- 
less and unprofitable discussion, men should apply 
themselves diligently to discover, by direct interroga- 
tion of Nature, how much matter can do without spir- 
itual help. Let each investigator pursue the method 



PREFACE. v 

of research which most suits the bent of his genius, 
and here, as in other departments of science, let each 
system be judged by its fruits, which cannot fail in 
the end to be the best sponsors and sureties for its 
truth. But the physiological inquirer into mind may, 
if he care to do so, justly protest against the easy con- 
fidence with which some metaphysical psychologists 
disdain physiological inquiry, and ignore its results, 
without ever having been at the pains to make them- 
selves acquainted with what these results are, and 
with the steps by which they have been reached. Let 
theory be what it may, there can be no just question 
of the duty of observing faithfully all the instances 
which mental phenomena offer for inductive inquiry, 
and of striving to realize the entirely new aspect 
which an exact study of the physiology of the nervous 
system gives to many problems of mental science. 
One reflection cannot fail to occur forcibly to those 
who have pursued this study, namely, that it would 
have been well could the physiological inquirer, after 
rising step by step from the investigation of life in its 
lowest forms to that of its highest and most complex 
manifestations, have entered upon his investigations 
of mind without being hampered by any philosophi- 
cal theories concerning it. The very terms of met- 
aphysical psychology have, instead of helping, op- 
pressed and hindered him to an extent which it is im- 
possible to measure: they have been hobgoblins to 



yi PREFACE. 

frighten him from entering on his path of inquiry, 
phantoms to lead him astray at every turn after he 
has entered upon it, deceivers lurking to betray him 
under the guise of seeming friends tendering help. 
Let him take all the pains in the world, he cannot ex- 
press adequately and exactly what he would— neither 
more nor less — for he must use words which have al- 
ready meanings of a metaphysical kind attached to 
them, and which, when used, are therefore for him 
more or less a misinterpretation. He is thus forced 
into an apparent encroachment on questions which he 
does not in the least degree wish to meddle with, and 
provokes an antagonism without ever designing it; 
and so one cannot but think it would have been well 
if he could have had his own words exactly fitting his 
facts, and free from the vagueness and ambiguity of a 
former metaphysical use. 

The article on the " Theory of Vitality," which ap- 
peared in 1863, is now reprinted, with a few, mainly 
verbal, alterations. The aspect of some of the ques- 
tions discussed in it has been somewhat changed by 
the progress of inquiry and thought since that time, 
but it appears to the Author that, great as discussion 
has been, there are yet considerations respecting vitali- 
ty that have not been duly weighed. Whether living 
matter was formed originally, or is now being formed, 
from non-living matter, by the operation of physical 
causes and natural laws, are questions which, notwith- 



PREFACE. vii 

standing the lively and vigorous handling which they 
have had, are far from being settled. Exact experi- 
ment can alone put an end to this dispute : the one 
conclusive experiment, indeed, in proof of the origin 
of living from dead matter, will be to make life. 
Meanwhile, as the subject is still in the region of dis- 
cussion, it is permissible to set forth the reflections 
which the facts seem to warrant, and to endeavor to 
indicate the direction of scientific development which 
seems to be foretokened by, or to exist potentially in, 
the knowledge which we have thus far acquired. This 
much may be said : that those who oppose the doc- 
trine of so-called spontaneous generation, not on the 
ground of the absence of conclusive evidence of its 
occurrence, which they might justly do, but on the 
ground of what they consider special characteristics 
of living matter, would do well to look with more in- 
sight into the phenomena of non-living Nature, and to 
consider more deeply what they see, in order to dis- 
cover whether the characteristic properties of life 
are quite so special and exclusive as they imagine 
them to be. Having done that, they might go on to 
consider whether, even if their premises were grant- 
ed, any conclusion regarding the mode of origin of life 
would legitimately follow; whether in fact it would 
not be entirely gratuitous and unwarrantable to con- 
clude thence the impossibility of the origin of living 
matter from non-living matter. The etymological im- 



viii PREFACE. 

port of the words physics and physiology is notably 
the same ; and it may be that, as has been suggested, 
in the difference of their application lies a hidden 
irony at the assumption on which the division is 
grounded. 

9, Hanover Square, W. 
November 5, 1870. 



CONTENTS 



LECTURES. 

PAGE 

I. — On the Physical Condition of Mental Function in 

Health . . . . . .11 

II. — On Certain Forms op Degeneracy op Mind, their 
Causation, and their Relations to other Dis- 
orders op the Neryous System . . . 41 

III. — On the Relations of Morbid Bodily States to Dis- 
ordered Mental Functions . . . . 'lO 



APPENDIX. 

I. — The Limits of Philosophical Inquiry . . 98 

II. — The Theory of Vitality . . . . .120 



BODY AKD MIND: 

AN INQUlEY INTO THEIE CONNECTION AND 

MUTUAL INFLUENCE, SPECIALLY IN KEFEKENCE TO 

MENTAL DISOKDEKS. 



LECTURE I. 

Gentlemen : The relations of mind and body in health 
and in disease I have chosen as the subject of these lectures, 
not with the hope of doing full justice to so complex and 
difficult an inquiry, but because it has for some time been 
my special work, and there was no other subject on which I 
should have felt myself equally justified in addressing you. 
No one can be more deeply sensible than I am how little 
exact our knowledge is of the bodily conditions of mental 
functions, and how much of that which we think we know 
is vague, uncertain, and fluctuating. But the time has come 
when the immediate business which lies before any one who 
would advance our knowledge of mind unquestionably is a 
close and searching scrutiny of the bodily conditions of its 
manifestations in health and disease. It is most necessary 
now to make use of the results of the study of mind in 
health to light and guide our researches into its morbid phe- 
nomena, and in like manner to bring the instructive in- 
stances presented by unsound mind to bear upon the inter- 
pretation of its healthy functions. The physiology and the 
pathology of mind are two branches of one science ; and he 



12 BODY AND MIND. 

who studies the one must, if he would work wisely and well, 
study the other also. My aim will be to promote the recon- 
ciliation between them, and in doing so I shall embrace the 
occasion, whenever it offers itself, to indicate the principles 
which should guide our efforts for what must always be the 
highest object of medical science and art — the production 
and preservation of a sound mind in a sound body. Act- 
ually to accomplish much of this purpose will not lie in 
my power, but I may bring together fragmentary observa- 
tions, point out the bearing of them on one another and on 
received opinions, thus unfold their meaning, and mark 
broadly the lines which future research must take. 

"Within the memory of men now living insanity was such 
a special study, and its treatment such a special art, that it 
stood quite aloof from general medicine in a mysterious and 
mischievous isolation ; owing little or nothing to the results 
of progress in other branches of medicine, and contributing 
nothing to their progress. The reason of this it is not hard 
to discover. The habit of viewing mind as an intangible 
entity or incorporeal essence, which science inherited from 
theology, prevented men from subjecting its phenomena to 
the same method of investigation as other natural phenom- 
ena; its disorders were thought to be an incomprehensible 
affliction and, in accordance with the theological notion, due 
to the presence of an evil spirit in the sufferer, or to the en- 
slavement of the soul by sin, or to any thing but their true 
cause — bodily disease. Consequently, the treatment of the 
insane was not in the hands of intelligent physicians, who 
aimed to apply the resources of medicine to the alleviation 
or cure of bodily illness, but was given up to coarse and ig- 
norant jailers, whose savage cruelties will for all time to 
come be a great and ugly blot upon the enlightenment of the 
age which tolerated them. 

Matters are happily changed now. On all hands it is ad- 
mitted that the manifestations of mind take place through 
the nervous system ; and that its derangements are the result 



ORGAN AND FUNCTION. 13 

of nervous disease, amenable to the same method of investi- 
gation as other nervous diseases. Insanity has accordingly 
become a strictly medical study, and its treatment a branch 
of medical practice. Still, it is all too true that, notwith- 
standing we know much, and are day by day learning more, 
of the physiology of the nervous system, we are only on the 
threshold of the study of it as an instrument subserving men- 
tal function. "We know little more positively than that it 
has such function ; we know nothing whatever of the physics 
and of the chemistry of thought. The conception of mind as a 
mysterious entity, different essentially from, and vastly supe- 
rior to, the body which it inhabits and uses as its earthly tene- 
ment, but from which its noblest aspirations are thought to 
be to get free, still works openly or in a latent way to ob- 
struct the study of its functions by the methods of physical 
research. Without speculating at all concerning the nature 
of mind — which, let me distinctly declare at the outset, is a 
question which science cannot touch, and I do not dream of 
attempting to touch — I do not shrink from saying that we 
shall make no progress toward a mental science if we begin 
by depreciating the body : not by disdaining it, as metaphy- 
sicians, religious ascetics, and maniacs have done, but by 
laboring in an earnest and inquiring spirit to understand 
it, shall we make any step forward; and when we have 
fully comprehended its functions, when we know how to 
estimate fitly this highest, most complex, and wonderful 
achievement of organized skill, it will be quite time, if 
there be then the inclination, to look down upon it with 
contempt. 

The truth is, that in inquiries concerning mind, as was 
once the case in speculations concerning other natural phe- 
nomena of forces, it has been the practice to begin where the 
inquiry should have ended. Just as the laws of physical ac- 
tions were evoked out of the depths of human consciousness, 
and the relations of bodies to one another attributed to sym- 
pathies and antipathies, attractions and abhorrences, instead 



14 BODY AND MIND. 

of being acquired by patient observation and careful generaliza- 
tion, so has a fabric of mental philosophy been reared on the 
doubtful revelations of self-consciousness, in entire disregard 
of the more tedious and less attractive duty of observation 
of facts, and induction from them. Surely it is time we 
put seriously to ourselves the question whether the inductive 
method, which has proved its worth by its abundant fruit- 
fulness wherever it has been faithfully applied, should not 
be as rigidly used in the investigation of mind as in the 
investigation of other natural phenomena. If so, we ought 
certainly to begin our inquiry with the observation of the 
simplest instances — with its physiological manifestations in 
animals, in children, in idiots, in savages, mounting by de- 
grees to the highest and most recondite facts of consciousness, 
the interpretation or the misinterpretation of which consti- 
tutes what has hitherto claimed to be mental philosophy. The 
inductions which we get by observing the simple may be used 
with success to disentangle the phenomena of the complex ; 
but the endeavor to apply the complex and obscure to the 
interpretation of the simple is sure to end in confusion and 
error. The higher mental faculties are formed by evolution 
from the more simple and elementary, just as the more spe- 
cial and complex structure proceeds from the more simple and 
general ; and in the one case as in the other we must, if 
we would truly learn, follow the order of development. ]Not 
that it is within my present purpose to trace the plan of 
development of our mental faculties, but the facts and argu- 
ments which I shall bring forward will prove how vain 
and futile it is to strive to rear a sound fabric of mental sci- 
ence on any other foundation. 

To begin the study of mind, then, with the observation 
of its humblest bodily manifestations is a strictly scientific 
method. "When we come to inquire what these are, it is far 
from easy to fix the point at which mental function begins. 
Without doubt most of the actions of man, and many of 
those of the higher animals, do evince the operation of mind, 



REFLEX ACTION. 15 

but whereabouts in the animal kingdom it first appears, and 
what part it has in the lower nerve-f unctions of man, are 
questions not easily answered. The more closely the matter 
is looked into, the more clearly it appears that we habitually 
embrace in our conception of mind different nervous func- 
tions, some of which proceed from different nerve-centres, 
and the more necessary it becomes to analyze these functions, 
to separate the more simple and elementary, and to discover 
in the concrete as much as possible of the meaning of the 
abstraction. Is the brain the exclusive organ of mind ? If 
it be so, to what category of functions shall we refer the re- 
flex acts of the spinal cord, which take place independently 
of the brain, and which often achieve as definite an end, and 
seem to display as intelligent an aim, as any conscious act of 
volition ? It needs not to illustrate in detail the nature and 
extent of reflex action, which is familiar enough, but I may 
select a striking example in order to serve as a text for the 
reflections which I wish to bring forward. One simple fact, 
rightly understood and truly interpreted, will teach as much 
as a thousand facts of the same kind, but the thousand must 
have been previously observed in order to understand truly 
the one ; for it is certainly true that, to apprehend the full 
meaning of common things, it is necessary to study a great 
many uncommon things. This, however, has been done in 
this instance by the distinguished physiologists whose labors 
have fixed on a tolerably firm basis the doctrine of reflex 
action; we may, therefore, take, as our starting-point, the 
accepted results of their labors. 

It is well known that, if the hind-foot of a frog that has 
had its head cut off be pinched, it is withdrawn from the ir- 
ritation. The stimulus to the afferent nerve reaches the gray 
matter of the spinal cord, and sets free a force which excites 
to action the corresponding motor nerves of the same side. 
"When the foot is pinched more strongly, the force liberated 
by the stimulus passes across the cord to the motor nerves 
of the opposite side, and there is a simultaneous withdrawal 



16 BODY AND MIND. 

of both limbs ; and, if the excitation be stronger still, there 
is a wider irradiation of the effects of the stimulus in the 
gray matter, and a movement of all four limbs follows, the 
frog jumping away. These movements of the decapitated 
frog, which it is plain effect the definite purpose of getting it 
out of the way of harm, we believe to be analogous to the 
violent coughing by which food that has gone the wrong way 
is expelled from the human larynx, or to the vomiting by 
which offending matter is ejected from the stomach. Inde- 
pendently of consciousness and of will, an organism plainly 
has the power — call it intelligent or call it what we will — of 
feeling and eschewing what is hurtful to it, as well as of feel- 
ing and ensuing what is beneficial to it. 

But the experiment on the frog may be made more striking 
and instructive. Touch with acetic acid the thigh of a de- 
capitated frog over the internal condyle, and the animal rubs 
it off with the dorsal surface of the foot of the same side ; 
cut off the foot, and apply the acid to the same spot, and the 
animal tries to get at it again with its foot, but, of course, 
having lost it, cannot. After some fruitless efforts, therefore, 
it gives up trying in that way, seems restless, as though, says 
Pfltiger, it was seeking some other way; and at last it makes 
use of the foot of the other leg, and succeeds in rubbing off 
the acid. Notably we have here not merely contractions of 
muscles, but combined and harmonized contractions in due 
sequence for a special purpose. There are actions that have 
all the appearance of being guided by intelligence and insti- 
gated by will in an animal the recognized organ of whose in- 
telligence and will has been removed. 

What are we to say in explanation of movements that have 
such a look of adaptation? Are they mental, or are they 
only physical? If they are mental, it is plain that we must 
much enlarge and modify our conception of mind, and of the 
seat of mind ; if physical, it is plain that we must subtract 
from mind functions that are essential to its full function, and 
properties that are the very foundations of its development 



PURPOSIVE ACTS. 17 

in the higher centres. Some eminent physiologists now 
maintain, on tbe strength of these experiments, that the ac- 
cepted doctrine of reflex action is quite untenable, and that 
the spinal cord is really endowed with sensation and volition ; 
and certainly these adapted actions seem to give us all the 
signs of being felt and willed, except telling us that they are 
so. Before accepting, however, this explanation of the ob- 
scure by something more obscure still, it were well to realize 
distinctly how dangerous a practice it usually is to apply de- 
ductively to the interpretation of simple phenomena ideas 
pertaining to the more complex, and how essential a princi- 
ple of the method of induction it is to follow the order of 
evolution, and to ascend from the interpretation of the sim- 
ple to that of the complex. The explanation savors of the 
old and evil tendency which has done so much harm in phi- 
losophy, the tendency to explain the facts of Nature by what 
we feel to go on in our minds ; because we know that most of 
our actions take place consciously and voluntarily, we can hard- 
ly help thinking that it must be the same in the frog. Might 
we not, however, as well suppose and hold that positive at- 
tracts negative and repels positive electricity consciously and 
voluntarily, or that in the double decomposition of chemical 
salts one acid chooses voluntarily the other base ? It is most 
necessary to be on our guard against the danger of misapply- 
ing ideas derived from internal observation of the functions 
of mind-centres to the interpretation of the functions of 
lower nerve-centres, and so of misinterpreting them. As- 
suredly we have sad experience enough to warn us against 
involving the latter in the metaphysical haze which still 
hangs over the functions of the supreme centres. 

All the conclusion which the facts warrant is that actions 
for a definite end, having indeed the semblance of predesign- 
ing consciousness and will, may be quite unconscious and auto- 
matic ; that the movements of the decapitated frog, adapted 
as they are to secure its well-being, are no more evidence of 
intelligence and will than are the movements of coughing, 



18 BODY AND MIND. 

sneezing, and swallowing in man. In the constitution of the 
animal's spinal cord are implanted the faculties of such move- 
ments for self-preservation, which it has inherited as a part 
of its nature, and without which it could hardly live a day ; 
accordingly it acts necessarily and blindly ; though it has lost 
its foot, it endeavors vainly to act as if its foot was still there, 
and only when the irritation continues unaffected by its futile 
efforts makes, in answer to it, those further reflex movements 
which are the physiological sequences of the unsuccessful 
movements : it supplements one series of reflex actions by 
another.* But, although these purposive movements are not 
evidence of intelligence and volition in the spinal cord, it is 
another question whether they do not evince the same physi- 
ological properties and the operation of the same laws of 
evolution as govern the development of intelligence and will 
in the higher centres. 

I have taken the experiment on the frog to exemplify the 
proposition that designed actions may be unconscious and 
automatic, because the phenomena are more simple in it than 
in man, and more easy therefore to be understood ; but the 
proposition is equally true of his spinal cord. In its case, 
however, we have to bear in mind that faculties are not in- 
nate to the same degree and extent as in the lower animals, 
but have to be acquired by education — to be organized, in 
fact, after birth. It must be taught, just as the brain must, 
before it can perform its functions as an organ of animal life ; 
and, being much more under the control of the more highly- 
developed brain, feeling and volition commonly mingle largely 
in its functions, and its independent action cannot be so 
plainly exhibited. But, when its motor centres have been 
taught, when they have gained by education the power of 
executing what are called secondary automatic acts, it is cer- 

* Wisely or unwisely, as the case may be ; for reflex movements which 
commonly effect a useful end may, under the changed circumstances of dis- 
ease, do great mischief, becoming even the occasion of violent suffering 
and of a most painful death. 



SECONDARY AUTOMATIC ACTS. 19 

tain that it can and does habitually execute them indepen- 
dently of consciousness and of will. They become as purely 
automatic as are the primitive reflex acts of the frog. To the 
statement, then, that actions bearing the semblance of design 
may be unconscious and automatic we have now to add a 
second and most weighty proposition — namely, that acts con- 
sciously designed at first may, by repetition, become uncon- 
scious and automatic, the faculties of them being organized 
in the constitution of the nerve-centres, and they being then 
performed as reflex effects of an external stimulus. This law, 
by which the education of the spinal cord takes place, is, as 
we shall hereafter see, a most important law in the develop- 
ment of the higher nerve-centres. 

Let us now go a step further. The automatic acts, whether 
primary or secondary, in the frog or in the man, which are 
excited by the suitable external stimulus, may also be excited 
by an act of will, by an impulse coming downward from the 
brain. When this happens, it should be clearly apprehended 
that the immediate agency of the movements is the same ; it 
is in the motor centres of the spinal cord ; the will does not 
and cannot act upon the nerve-fibres of each muscle individu- 
ally, but simply gives the order which sets in motion the or- 
ganized machinery of the movements in the proper motor 
centres. This is a consideration of the utmost importance, 
for it exhibits how great a part of our voluntary acts is really 
the automatic action of the spinal cord. The same move- 
ments are effected by the same agency in answer to different 
stimuli — in the one case to an external stimulus, in the other 
case to an impulse of will ; and in both cases the mind is alike 
ignorant of the immediate agency by which they are done. 
But while the automatic acts take place independently of 
will, the will is absolutely dependent on "the organized expe- 
rience in the cord for the accomplishment of its acts ; with- 
out this it would be impotent to do a voluntary act. When, 
therefore, we have taken out of a voluntary act the large 
part which is due to the automatic agency of the motor cen- 



20 BODY AND MIND. 

tres, it clearly appears that we have subtracted no small 
proportion from what we are in the habit of comprising 
vaguely under mind. We perceive, indeed, how indispensa- 
ble an exact and faithful observation of the functions of the 
spinal cord is to a true physiological inquiry into mind, and 
what an important means of analysis a knowledge of them 
yields us. Carrying the knowledge so gained into our exami- 
nation of the functions of the higher nerve-centres, we ob- 
serve how much of them it will serve to interpret. The re- 
sult is, that we find a great part of the habitual functions of 
the higher centres to be similarly automatic, and to admit of 
a similar ph} r siological interpretation. 

There can be no doubt that the ganglionic nuclei of the 
senses — the sensorial nuclei — are connected with motor nu- 
clei ; and that we have in such anatomical arrangement the 
agency of a number of reflex movements. Most of the in- 
stinctive acts of animals are of this kind, the faculties being 
innate in them. In man, however, who is actually the most 
helpless, though potentially the most powerful, of all living 
creatures when he comes into the world, the sensory and 
associated motor nuclei must be educated, just as the spinal 
centres must. To illustrate this sensori-motor or instinctive 
action, we may take the results of Flourens's well-known 
experiment of removing the cerebral hemispheres of a pigeon. 
What happens ? The pigeon seemingly loses at once all in- 
telligence and all power of spontaneous action. It appears 
as if it were asleep ; yet, if thrown into the air, it will fly. 
If laid on its back, it struggles on to its legs again ; the pupil 
of the eye contracts to light, and, if the light be very bright, 
the eyes are shut. It will dress its feathers if they are ruffled, 
and will sometimes follow with a movement of its head the 
movement of a candle before it ; and, when a pistol is fired off, 
it will open its eyes, stretch its neck, raise its head, and then 
fall back into its former attitude. It is quite evident from 
this experiment that general sensibility and special sensations 
are possible after the removal of the hemispheres ; but they 



SENSORI-MOTOR ACTS. 21 

are not tlien transformed into ideas. The impressions of sense 
reach and affect the sensory centres, but they are not intel- 
lectually perceived; and the proper movements are excited, 
but these are reflex or automatic. There are no ideas, there 
is no true spontaneity ; and the animal would die of hunger 
before a plateful of food, though it will swallow it when 
pushed far enough into its mouth to come within the range 
of the reflex acts of deglutition. Here again, then, we have 
a surprising variety of adapted actions of which the body is 
capable without the intervention of intelligence, emotion, and 
will — without, in fact, mind in its exact sense having any part 
in them. The pigeon is brought to the level of the inverte- 
brata, which have no higher nerve-centres than sensory 
ganglia, no centres of intelligence and will, and which exe- 
cute all their varied and active movements, all their wonder- 
ful displays of instinct, through sensory and associated motor 
nuclei. They seek what is good for them, avoid what is 
hurtful to them, provide for the propagation of their kind — 
perform, indeed, all the functions of a very active life without 
knowing that they are doing so, not otherwise than as our 
pupils contract to light, or as our eyes accommodate them- 
selves to vision at different distances, without consciousness 
on our part. The highest specializations of this kind of 
nerve-function are displayed by the ant and the bee ; their 
wonderful instinctive arts show to what a degree of special 
perfection sensori-motor action may be brought.* 

* I do not say that the ant and the bee are entirely destitute of any power 
of adaptation to new experiences in their lives— that they are, in fact, purely 
organized machines, acting always with unvarying regularity; it would 
appear, indeed, from close observation, that these creatures do sometimes 
discover in their actions traces of a sensibility to strange experiences, and 
of corresponding adaptation of movements. We cannot, moreover, con- 
ceive how the remarkable instincts which they manifest can have been 
acquired originally, except by virtue of some such power. But the power 
in them now is evidently of a rudimentary kind, and must remain so while 
they have not those higher nerve-centres in which the sensations are com- 
bined into ideas, and perceptions of the relations of things are acquired. 
Granting, however, that the bee or ant has these traces of adaptive action, 



22 BODY AND MIND. 

Unlike the Dee and the ant, man must slowly learn the 
use of his senses and their respondent movements. This he 
does by virtue of the fundamental property of nerve-centres, 
whereby they react in a definite way to suitable impressions, 
organically register their experience, and so acquire by edu- 
cation their special faculties. Thus it is that many of the 
daily actions of our life, which directly follow impressions 
on the senses, take place in answer to sensations that are not 
perceived — become, so to speak, instinctive ; some of them 
being not a whit less automatic than the instinctive acts of 
the bee, or the acts of the pigeon deprived of its hemispheres. 
When we move about in a room with the objects in which 
we are quite familiar, we direct our steps so as to avoid them, 
without being conscious what they are, or what we are do- 
ing ; we see them, as we easily discover if we try to move 
about in the same way with our eyes shut, but we do not 
perceive them, the mind being fully occupied with some train 
of thought. In like manner, when we go through a series 
of familiar acts, as in dressing or undressing ourselves, the 
operations are really automatic ; once begun, we continue 
them in a mechanical order, while the mind is thinking of 
other things ; and if we afterward reflect upon what we have 
done, in order to call to mind whether we did or did not omit 
something, as for instance to wind up our watch, we cannot 
satisfy ourselves except by trial, even though we had actually 
done what we were in doubt about. It is evident, indeed, 
that in a state of profound reverie or abstraction a person 
may, as a somnambulist sometimes does, see without know- 
it must "be allowed that they are truly rudiments of functions, which in the 
supreme nerve-centres we designate as reason and volition. Such a con- 
fession might be a trouble to a metaphysical physiologist, who would there- 
upon find it necessary to place a metaphysical entity behind the so-called 
instincts of the bee, but can be no trouble to the inductive physiologist ; he 
simply recognizes an illustration of a physiological diffusion of properties, 
and of the physical conditions of primitive volition, and traces in the evo- 
lution of mind and its organs, as in the evolution of other functions and 
their organs, a progressive specialization and increasing complexity. 



SUPREME NERVE-CENTRES. 23 

ing that lie sees, hear without knowing that he hears, and go 
through a series of acts scarcely, if at all, conscious of them 
at the time, and not remembering them afterward. For the 
most distinct display of sensori-motor action in man, it is 
necessary that his cerebral hemispheres, which are so largely 
developed, and intervene much in the functions of the subor- 
dinate centres, should be deeply engaged in their own func- 
tions, or that these should be suspended. This appears to 
be the case in those brief attacks of epileptic unconsciousness 
known as the petit mal, in which a person will sometimes 
go on with the work he was engaged in at the time of the 
attack, utterly unaware of the momentary interruption of 
his consciousness.* There are many instances of this sort on 
record, which I cannot stop to relate now ; they prove how 
large a part sensori-motor functions, which are the highest 
nerve-functions of so many animals, play in our daily actions. 
We ought clearly to apprehend the fact that, as with the 
spinal cord, so here, the movements which take place in an- 
swer to the stimulus from without may be excited by the 
stimulus of the will descending from the hemispheres, and 
that, when they are so excited, the immediate agency of them 
is the same. The movements that are outwardly manifest 
are, as it were, contained inwardly in the appropriate motor 
nuclei ; these have been educated to perform them. Hence 
it is that, when the left corpus striatum is broken up by dis- 
ease, the right cannot do its special work ; if it could, a man 
might write with his left hand when his right hand was dis- 
abled by paralysis. 

Thus much, then, concerning our sensori-motor acts. 
When we have yielded up to the spinal cord all the part in 
our actions that properly belongs to it, and to the sensory gan- 
glia and their connected motor nuclei all the part that be- 
longs to them, we have subtracted no inconsiderable part 
from the phenomena which we are in the habit of designating 

* For examples, I may refer to my work on " The Physiology and Pa- 
thology of Mind-," 2d edition. 



24 BODY AND MIND. 

mental and including under mind. But we still leave un- 
touched the highest functions of the nervous system — those 
to which the hemispherical ganglia minister. These are the 
functions of intelligence, of emotion, and of will ; they are 
the strictly mental functions. The question at once arises 
whether we have to do in these supreme centres with funda- 
mentally different properties and different laws of evolution 
from those which belong to the lower nerve-centres. We 
have to do with different functions certainly ; but are the 
organic processes which take place in them essentially differ- 
ent from, or are they identical with, those of the lower 
nerve-centres? They appear to be essentially the same: 
there is a reception of impressions, and there is a reaction to 
impressions, and there is an organic registration of the effects 
both of the impressions and of the reactions to them. The ex- 
ternal stimuli do not, it is true, ascend directly to the supreme 
centres as they do to the spinal centres and the sensory cen- 
tres; they are transmitted indirectly through the sensory 
ganglia ; it is through the senses that we get our ideas. This 
is in accordance with the anatomical observation — which, 
however, is disputed — that no sensory fibres go directly 
through to the hemispheres, and no motor fibres start directly 
from them ; both sensory and motor fibres stopping at the 
corpora striata and thalami optici, and new fibres connect- 
ing these with the hemispheres. But this does not alter the 
fundamental similarity of the organic processes in the higher 
centres. The impressions which are made there are the physi- 
ological conditions of ideas; the feeling of the ideas is emo- 
tion — for I hold emotion to mean the special sensibility of 
the vesicular neurine to ideas — the registration of them is 
memory ; and the reaction to them is volition. Attention 
is the maintenance of the tension of an idea or a group of 
ideas — the keeping it before the mind ; and reflection is the 
successive transference of energy from one to another of a 
series of ideas. We know not, and perhaps never shall know, 
what mind is ; but we are nevertheless bound to investigate, 



MEMORY. 25 

in a scientific spirit, the laws of its functions, and to trace 
the resemblances which undoubtedly exist between them and 
the functions of lower nerve-centres. 

Take, for example, the so-called faculty of memory, of 
which metaphysicians have made so much as affording us the 
knowledge of personal identity. From the way in which 
they usually treat of it, one would suppose that memory was 
peculiar to mind, and far beyond the reach of physical ex- 
planation. But a little reflection will prove that it is noth- 
ing of the kind. The acquired functions of the spinal cord, 
and of the sensory ganglia, obviously imply the existence of 
memory, which is indispensable to their formation and exer- 
cise. How else could these centres be educated ? The im- 
pressions made upon them, and the answering movements, 
both leave their traces behind them, which are capable of 
being revived on the occasions of similar impressions. A 
ganglionic centre, whether of mind, sensation, or movement, 
which was without memory, would be an idiotic centre, in- 
capable of being taught its functions. In every nerve-ceil 
there is memory, and not only so, but there is memory in 
every organic element of the body. The virus of small-pox 
or of syphilis makes its mark on the constitution for the rest 
of life. We may forget it, but it will not forget us, though, 
like the memory of an old man, it may fade and become faint 
with advancing age. The manner in which the scar of a cut 
in a child's finger is perpetuated, and grows as thebody grows, 
evinces, as Mr. Paget has pointed out, that the organic ele- 
ment of the partem einbers the change which it has suffered. 
Memory is the organic registration of the effects of impres- 
sions, the organization of experience, and to recollect is to 
revive this experience — to call the organized residua into 
functional activity. 

The fact that memory is accompanied by consciousness in 

the supreme centres does not alter the fundamental nature of 

the organic processes that are the condition of it. The more 

sure and perfect, indeed, memory becomes, the more uncon- 

2 



26 BODY AND MIND. 

scions it becomes; and, when an idea or mental state has 
been completely organized, it is revived without conscious- 
ness, and takes its part automatically in onr mental opera- 
tions, just as an habitual movement does in our bodily activ- 
ity. "We perceive in operation here the same law of organi- 
zation of conscious acquisitions as unconscious power, which 
we observed in the functions of the lower nerve-centres. A 
child, while learning to speak or read, has to remember the 
meaning of each word, must tediously exercise its memory ; 
but which of us finds it necessary to remember the meanings 
of the common words which we are daily using, as we must 
do those of a foreign language with which we are not very 
familiar ? "We do remember them, of course, but it is by an 
unconscious memory. In like manner, a pupil, learning to 
play the piano-forte, is obliged to call to mind each note: but 
the skilful player goes through no such process of conscious 
remembrance ; his ideas, like his movements, are automatic, 
and both so rapid as to surpass the rapidity of succession of 
conscious ideas and movements. To my mind, there are in- 
controvertible reasons to conclude that the organic conditions 
of memory are the same in the supreme centres of thought 
as they are in the lower centres of sensation and of reflex 
action. Accordingly, in a brain that is not disorganized by 
injury or disease, the organic registrations are never actually 
forgotten, but endure while life lasts ; no wave of oblivion 
can efface their characters. Consciousness, it is true, may 
be impotent to recall them ; but a fever, a blow on the head, 
a poison in the blood, a dream, the agony of drowning, the 
hour of death, rending the veil between our present con- 
sciousness and these inscriptions, will sometimes call viv- 
idly back, in a momentary flash, and call back too with all 
the feelings of the original experience, much that seemed to 
have vanished from the mind forever. In the deepest and 
most secret recesses of mind, there is nothing hidden from 
the individual self, or from others, which may not be thus 
some time accidentally revealed ; so that it might well be 



VOLITION. 27 

that, as De Quincey surmised, the opening of the book at 
the clay of judgment shall be the unfolding of the everlasting 
scroll of memory.* 

As it is with memory so is it with volition, which is a 
physiological function of the supreme centres, and which, like 
memory, becomes more unconscious and automatic the more 
completely it is organized by repeated practice. It is not 
man's function in life to think and feel only; his inner life he 
must express or utter in action of some kind — in word or 
deed. Eeceiving the impressions from Nature, of which lie 
is a part, he reacts upon Nature intelligently, modifying it in 
a variety of ways ; thus Nature passes through human na- 
ture to a higher evolution. As the spinal cord reacts to its 
impressions in excito-motor action, and as the sensory centres 
react to their impressions in sensori-motor action, so, after 
the complex interworking and combination of ideas in the 
hemispherical ganglia, there is, in like manner, a reaction or 
desire of determination of energy outward, in accordance 
with the fundamental property of organic structure to seek 
what is beneficial and shun what is hurtful to it. It is this 
property of tissue that gives the impulse which, when guided 
by intelligence, we call volition, and ifc is the abstraction 
from the particular volitions which metaphysicians personify 
as the icill, and regard as their determining agent. Physio- 
logically, we cannot choose but reject the will; volition we 
know, and will we know, but the will, apart from particular 
acts of volition or will, we cannot know. To interpose such 
a metaphysical entity between reflection and action there- 
upon would bring us logically to the necessity of interposing 
a similar entity between the stimulus to the spinal cord and 
its reaction. Thus, instead of unravelling the complex by 
help of the more simple, we should obscure the simple by 

* An apt illustration, most true to Nature, of the recurrence of early 
impressions in the delirium of dying, is afforded by Falstaff, who, as he 
expires in a London tavern after a life of debauchery, babbles of green 

fields. 



28 BODY AND MIND. 

speculations concerning the complex. As physiologists, we 
have to deal with volition as a function of the supreme cen- 
tres, following reflection, varying in quantity and quality as 
its cause varies, strengthened by education and exercise, en- 
feebled by disuse, decaying with decay of structure, and al- 
ways needing for its outward expression the educated agency 
of the subordinate motor centres. "We have to deal with 
will, not as a single undecomposable faculty unaffected by 
bodily conditions, but as a result of organic changes in the 
supreme centres, affected as certainly and seriously by dis- 
order of them as our motor faculties are by disorder of their 
centres. Loss of power of will is one of the earliest and most 
characteristic symptoms of mental derangement ; and what- 
ever may have been thought in times past, we know well 
now that the loss is not the work of some unclean spirit that 
has laid its hands upon the will, but the direct effect of 
physical disease. 

But I must pass on now to other matters, without stop- 
ping to unfold at length the resemblances between the prop- 
erties of the supreme centres and those of the lower nerve- 
centres. We see that the supreme centres are educated, as 
the other centres are, and the better they are educated the 
better do they perform their functions of thinking and willing. 
The development of mind is a gradual process of organization 
in them. Ideas, as they are successively acquired through 
the gateways of the senses, are blended and combined and 
grouped in a complexity that defies analysis, the organic com- 
binations being the physiological conditions of our highest 
mental operations — reflection, reasoning, and judgment. Two 
leading ideas we ought to grasp and hold fast : first, that the 
complex and more recondite phenomena of mind are formed 
out of the more simple and elementary by progressive spe- 
cialization and integration ; and, secondly, that the laws by 
means of which this formation takes place are not laws of 
association merely, but laws of organic combination and evo- 
lution. The growth of mental powder means an actual addi- 



MOTOR INTUITIONS. 29 

tion of structure to the intimate constitution of the centres 
of mind — a mental organization in them ; and mental derange- 
ment means disorder of them, primary or secondary, func- 
tional or organic. 

Although I have declared the hemispherical ganglia to be 
preeminently the mind-centres, and although it is in disorder 
of their functions — in disordered intelligence, in disordered 
emotion, and in disordered will — that insanity essentially con- 
sists, it is nevertheless impossible to limit the study of our 
mental operations to the study of them. They receive im- 
pressions from every part of the body, and, there is reason to 
believe, exert an influence on every element of it : there is 
not an organic motion, sensible or insensible, which does not, 
consciously or unconsciously, affect them, and which they in 
turn do not consciously or unconsciously affect. So intimate 
and essential is the sympathy between all the organic func- 
tions, of which mind is the crown and consummation, that we 
may justly say of it, that it sums up and comprehends the 
bodily life — that every thing which is displayed outwardly is 
contained secretly in the innermost. "We cannot truly under- 
stand mind -functions without embracing in our inquiry all 
the bodily functions and, I might perhaps without exaggera- 
tion say, all the bodily features. 

I have already shown this in respect of motor functions, 
by exhibiting how entirely dependent for its expression will 
is upon the organized mechanism of the motor centres — how, 
in effecting voluntary movements, it presupposes the appro- 
priate education of the motor centres. Few persons, perhaps, 
consider what a wonderful art speech is, or even remember 
that it is an art which we acquire. But it actually costs us a 
great deal of pains to learn to speak ; all the language which 
an infant has is a cry ; and it is only because we begin to learn 
to talk when we are very young, and are constantly prac- 
tising, that we forget how specially we have had to educate 
our motor centres of speech. Here, however, we come to 
another pregnant consideration: the acquired faculty of the 



30 BODY AND MIND. 

educated motor centre is not only a necessary agency in the 
performance of a voluntary act, but I maintain that it posi- 
tively enters as a mental element into the composition of the 
definite volition ; that, in fact, the specific motor faculty not 
only acts downward upon the motor nerves, thus executing 
the movement, but also acts upward upon the mind-centres, 
thereby giving to consciousness the conception of the suitable 
movement — the appropriate motor intuition. It is certain 
that, in order to execute consciously a voluntary act, we must 
have in the mind a conception of the aim or purpose of the 
act. The will cannot act upon the separate muscles, it can 
only determine the result desired ; and thereupon the com- 
bined contraction, in due force and rapidity, of the separate 
muscles takes place in a way that we have no consciousness 
of, and accomplishes the act. The infant directly it is born 
can suck, certainly not consciously or voluntarily ; on the first 
occasion, at any rate, it can have no notion of the purpose of 
its movements ; but the effect of the action is to excite in the 
mind the special motor intuition, and to lay the foundation 
of the special volition of it. We cannot do an act voluntarily 
unless we know what we are going to do, and we cannot 
know exactly what we are going to do until we have taught 
ourselves to do it. This exact knowledge of the aim of the 
act, which we get by experience, the motor intuition gives us. 
The essential intervention of the motor intuition, which 
is, as it were, the abstract of the movement, in our mental 
life, is best illustrated by the movements of speech, but is by 
no means peculiar to them. Each word represents a certain 
association and succession of muscular acts, and is itself noth- 
ing more than a conventional sign or symbol to mark the par- 
ticular muscular expression of a particular idea. The word 
has not independent vitality ; it differs in different languages ; 
and those who are deprived of the power of articulate speech 
must make use of other muscular acts to express their ideas, 
speaking, as it were, in a dumb discourse. There is no reason 
on earth, indeed, why a person might not learn to express 



GESTURE LANGUAGE. 31 

every thought which he can ntter in speech by movements 
of his fingers, limbs, and body — by the silent language of ges- 
ture. The movements of articulation have not, then, a special 
hind of connection with the mind, though their connection is 
a specially intimate one ; they are simply the most convenient 
for the expression of our mental states, because they are so 
numerous, various, delicate, and complex, and because, in con- 
junction with the muscles of the larynx and the respiratory 
muscles, they modify sound, and thus make audible language. 
Having, on this account, been always used as the special in- 
struments of utterance, their connection with thought is most 
intimate ; the Greeks, in fact, used the word \6yos to mean 
both reason and speech. But this does not make the rela- 
tions of the movements of speech to mind different funda- 
mentally from the relations of other voluntary movements to 
mind; and we should be quite as much warranted in assign- 
ing to the mind a special faculty of writing, of walking, or of 
gesticulating, as in speaking of a special faculty of speech in it. 
What is true of the relations of articulate movements to 
mental states is true of the relations of other movements to 
mental states : they not only express the thought, but, when 
otherwise put in action, they can excite the appropriate 
thought. Speak the word, and the idea of which it is the ex- 
pression is aroused, though it was not in the mind previously; 
or put other muscles than those of speech into an attitude 
which is the normal expression of a certain mental state, and 
the latter is excited. Most if not all men, when thinking, 
repeat internally, whisper to themselves, as it were, what they 
are thinking about; and persons of dull and feeble intel- 
ligence cannot comprehend what they read, or what is some- 
times said to them, without calling the actual movement to 
their aid, and repeating the words in a whisper or aloud. As 
speech has become the almost exclusive mode of expressing 
our thoughts, there not being many gestures of the body 
which are the habitual expressions of simple ideas, we cannot 
present striking examples of the powers of other movements 



32 BODY AND MIND. 

to call up the appropriate ideas ; yet the delicate muscular 
adaptations which effect the accommodation of the eye to 
vision at different distances seem really to give to the mind 
its ideas of distance and magnitude. No one actually sees 
distance and magnitude ; he sees only certain signs from 
which he has learned to judge intuitively of them — the mus- 
cular adaptations, though he is unconscious of them, impart- 
ing the suitable intuitions. 

The case is stronger, however, in regard to our emotions. 
Visible muscular expression is to passion what language or 
audible muscular expression is to thought. Bacon rightly, 
therefore, pointed out the advantage of a study of the forms 
of expression. "For," he says, "the lineaments of the body 
do disclose the disposition and inclination of the mind in gen- 
eral ; but the motions of the countenance and parts do not 
only so, but do further disclose the present humor and state 
of the mind or will." The muscles of the countenance are 
the chief exponents of human feeling, much of the variety of 
which is due to the action of the orbicular muscles with the 
system of elevating and depressing muscles. Animals cannot 
laugh, because, besides being incapable of ludicrous ideas, 
they do not possess in sufficient development the orbicular 
muscle of the lips and the straight muscles which act upon 
them. It is because of the superadded muscles and of their 
combined actions — not combined contraction merely, but 
consentaneous action, the relaxation of some accompanying 
the contraction of others — that the human countenance is 
capable of expressing a variety of more complex emotions 
than animals can. Those who would degrade the body, in 
order, as they imagine, to exalt the mind, should consider 
more deeply than they do the importance of our muscular 
expressions of feeling. The manifold shades and kinds of 
expression which the lips present — their gibes, gambols, and 
flashes of merriment; the quick language of a quivering 
nostril ; the varied waves and ripples of beautiful emotion 
which play on the human countenance, with the spasms of 



MUSCULAR EXPRESSION. 33 

passion that disfigure it — all which we take such pains to 
embody in art — are simply effects of muscular action, and 
might be produced by electricity or any other stimulus, if we 
could only apply it in suitable force to the proper muscles. 
"When the eye is turned upward in rapt devotion, in the 
ecstasy of supplication, it is for the same reason as it is rolled 
upward in fainting, in sleep, in the agony of death : it is an 
involuntary act of the oblique muscles, when the straight 
muscles cease to act upon it. "We perceive, then, in the study 
of muscular action, the reason why man looks up to heaven 
in prayer, and why he has placed there the power " whence 
cometh his help." A simple property of the body, as Sir 0. 
Bell observes — the fact that the eye in supplication takes 
what is its natural position when not acted upon by the will 
— has influenced our conceptions of heaven, our religious ob- 
servances, and the habitual expression of our highest feelings. 
Whether each passion which is special in kind has its 
special bodily expression, and what is the expression of each, 
it would take me too long to examine now. Suffice it to say 
that the special muscular action is not merely the exponent 
of the passion, but truly an essential part of it. Fix the 
countenance in the pattern of a particular emotion — in a 
look of anger, of wonder, or of scorn — and the emotion 
whose appearance is thus imitated will not fail to be aroused. 
And if we try, while the features are fixed in the expression 
of one passion, to call up in the mind a quite different one, 
we shall find it impossible to do so. This agrees with the 
experiments of Mr. Braid on persons whom he had put into 
a state of hypnotism; for, when the features or the limbs 
were made by him to assume the expression of a particular 
emotion, thereupon the emotion was actually felt by the pa- 
tient, who began to act as if he was under its influence. "We 
perceive then that the muscles are not alone the machinery 
by which the mind acts upon the world, but that their ac- 
tions are essential elements in our mental operations. The 
superiority of the human over the animal mind seems to be 



34 BODY AND MIND. 

essentially connected with the greater variety of muscular 
action of which man is capable : were he deprived of the in- 
finitely-varied movements of hands, tongue, larynx, lips, and 
face, in which he is so far ahead of the animals, it is prob- 
able that he would be no better than an idiot, notwithstand- 
ing he might have a normal development of brain.* 

If these reflections are well grounded, it is obvious that 
disorder of the motor centres may have, as I believe it has, 
no little effect upon the phenomena of mental derangement. 
In some cases of insanity there are genuine muscular hallu- 
cinations, just as there are in dreams sometimes, when the 
muscles are in a constrained attitude ; and, where the morbid 
effects are not so marked, there is good reason to suppose 
that a searching inquiry along this almost untrodden path 
will disclose the mode of generation of many delusions that 
seem now inexplicable. 

But we cannot limit a complete study of mind even by a 
full knowledge of the functions of the nervous and muscular 
systems. The organic system has most certainly an essential 
part in the constitution and the functions of mind. In the 
great mental revolution caused by the development of the 
sexual system at puberty we have the most striking example 
of the intimate and essential sympathy between the brain as 
a mental organ and other organs of the body. The change 
of character at this period is not by any means limited to the 
appearance of the sexual feelings and their sympathetic 
ideas, but, when traced to its ultimate reach, will be found 
to extend to the highest feelings of mankind, social, moral, 
and even religious. In its lowest sphere, as a mere animal 
iustinct, it is clear that the sexual appetite forces the most 
selfish person out of the little circle of self-feeling into a 
wider feeling of family sympathy and a rudimentary moral 
feeling. The consequence is that, when an individual is sexu- 

* There may "be no little truth, therefore, though not the entire truth, 
in the saying of Anaxagoras, that man is the wisest of animals by reason 
of his having hands. 



ORGANIC FUNCTIONS. 35 

ally mutilated at an early age, he is emasculated morally as 
well as physically. Eunuchs are said to be the most de- 
praved creatures morally : they are cowardly, envious liars, 
utterly deceitful, and destitute of real social feeling. And 
there is certainly a characteristic variety of insanity caused 
by self-abuse, which makes the patient very like a eunuch in 
character. 

It has been affirmed by some philosophers that there is 
no essential difference between the mind of a woman and 
that of a man; and that if a girl were subjected to the same 
education as a boy, she would resemble him in tastes, feel- 
ings, pursuits, and powers. To my mind it would not be one 
whit more absurd to affirm that the antlers of the stag, the 
human beard, and the cock's comb, are effects of education ; 
or that, by putting a girl to the same education as a boy, the 
female generative organs might be transformed into male 
organs. The physical and mental differences between the 
sexes intimate themselves very early in life, and declaro 
themselves most distinctly at puberty : they are connected 
with the influence of the organs of generation. The forms 
and habits of mutilated men approach those of women ; and 
women, whose ovaries and uterus remain from some cause in 
a state of complete inaction, approach the forms and habits 
of men. It is said, too, that in hermaphrodites the mental 
character, like the physical, participates equally in that of 
both sexes. While woman preserves her sex, she will neces- 
sarily be feebler than man, and, having her special bodily 
and mental characters, will have to a certain extent her own 
sphere of activity ; where she has become thoroughly mas- 
culine in nature, or hermaphrodite in mind — when, in fact, 
she has pretty well divested herself of her sex — then she 
may take his ground, and do his work ; but she will have 
lost her feminine attractions, and probably also her chief 
feminine functions. 

Allowing that the generative organs have their specific 
effect upon the mind, the question occurs whether each of 



36 BODY AND MIND. 

the internal organs has not also a special effect, giving rise to 
particular feelings with their sympathetic ideas. They are 
notably united in the closest sympathy, so that, although in- 
sensible to touch, they have a sensibility of their own, by 
virtue of which they agree in a consent of functions, and re- 
spond more or less to one another's sufferings ; and there can 
be no question that the brain, as the leading member of this 
physiological union, is sensible of, and affected by, the con- 
ditions of its fellow-members. We have not the same oppor- 
tunity of observing the specific effects of other organs that 
we have in the case of the generative organs ; for while 
those come into functional action directly after birth, these 
come into action abruptly at a certain period, and thus ex- 
hibit their specific effects in a decided manner. It may well 
be, however, that the general uniformity among men in their 
passions and emotions is due to the specific sympathies of 
organs, just as the uniformity of their ideas of external Na- 
ture is due to the uniform operation of the organs of sense. 
It is probable that an exact observation of the mental ef- 
fects of morbid states of the different organs would help the 
inquiry into the feelings and desires of the mind which owe 
their origin to particular organs. What are the psychological 
features of disease of the heart, disease of the lungs, disease 
of the liver? They are unquestionably different in each case. 
The inquiry, which has never yet been seriously attempted, 
is, without doubt, a difficult one, but I believe that the phe- 
nomena of dreams might, if carefully observed, afford some 
help. The ground-tone of feeling in a dream, the background 
on which the phantoms move, is often determined by the 
state of an internal organ, the irritation of which awakens 
into some degree of activity that part of the brain with 
which the organ is in specific sympathy ; accordingly sympa- 
thetic ideas spring out of the feeling and unite in a more or 
less coherent dream-drama. How plainly this happens in the 
case of the generative organs it is unnecessary to j>oint out : 
exciting their specific dreams, they teach a lesson concerning 



SPECIFIC ORGANIC SYMPATHIES. 37 

physiological sympathies which, applied to the observation 
of the effects of other organs, may be largely useful in the 
interpretation, not of dreams only, but of the phenomena of 
insanity. Dreams furnish a particularly fruitful field for the 
.study of the specific effects of organs on mind, because these 
effects are more distinctly felt and more distinctly declared 
when the impressions from the external senses are shut out 
by sleep. As the stars are not visible, although they still 
shine, in the daytime, so the effects of an internal organ may 
not be perceptible during the waking state while conscious- 
ness is actively engaged. But just as, when the sun goes 
down, the stars shine visibly, which before were invisible, 
veiled by his greater light, so when active consciousness is 
suspended, organic sympathies, which before were iusensible, 
declare themselves in the mind. Perhaps it is in the excita- 
tion of its sympathetic feeling and ideas by a disordered organ 
during sleep that we may discover the explanation of a fact 
which seems to be undoubted, and to be more than accident- 
al — namely, that a person has sometimes dreamed propheti- 
cally that he would have a particular internal disease, before 
he consciously felt a symptom of it, and has been afterward 
surprised to find his dream come true. 

It is natural to suppose that the passion which a particu- 
lar organ produces in the mind will be that which, when 
otherwise excited, discharges itself specially upon that organ. 
Notably this is the case with the sexual organs and the pas- 
sion to which they minister. When we consider the effects 
which a joyful anticipation, or the elation of a present ex- 
citement, has upon the lungs — the accelerated breathing and 
the general bodily exhilaration which it occasions — we can- 
not help thinking of the strange hopefulness and the sanguine 
expectations of the consumptive patient, who, on the edge 
of the grave, projects, without a shadow of distrust, what he 
will do long after he will have been "green in death and fes- 
tering in his shroud." Observe how fear strikes the heart, 
and what anxious fear and apprehension accompany some 



38 BODY AND MIND. 

affections of the heart. Anger, disappointment, and envy, 
notably touch the liver ; which, in its turn, when deranged, 
engenders a gloomy tone of mind through which all things 
have a malignant look, and from which, when philosophy 
avails not to free us, the restoration of its functions will 
yield instant relief. The internal organs are plainly not the 
agents of their special functions only, but, by reason of the 
intimate consent or sympathy of functions, they are essential 
constituents of our mental life. 

The time yet at my disposal will not allow me to do more 
than mention the effects of mental states on the intimate pro- 
cesses of nutrition and secretion. Emotion may undoubtedly 
favor, hinder, or pervert nutrition, and increase, lessen, or 
alter a secretion ; in doing which there is reason to think 
that it acts, not only by dilating or contracting the vessels 
through the vaso-motor system, as we witness in the blush 
of shame and the pallor of fear, but also directly on the or- 
ganic elements of the part through the nerves, which, as the 
latest researches seem to show, end in them sometimes by 
continuity of substance. If they do so end, it is difficult to 
conceive how a strong emotion vibrating to the ultimate 
fibrils of a nerve can fail to affect for a moment or longer 
the functions of the organic elements. Be this so or not, 
however, the familiar observations— first, that a lively hope 
or joy exerts an enlivening effect upon the bodily life, quiet 
and equable when moderate, but, when stronger, evinced in 
the brilliancy of the eye, in the quickened pulse and respira- 
tion, in an inclination to laugh and sing ; and, secondly, that 
grief or other depressing passion has an opposite effect, re- 
laxing the arteries, enfeebling the heart, making the eye dull, 
impeding digestion, and producing an inclination to sigh and 
weep — these familiar observations of opposite effects indicate 
the large part which mental states may play, not in the 
causation of all sorts of disease alone, but in aiding recov- 
ery from them. A sudden and great mental shock may, like 
a great physical shock, and perhaps in the same way, par- 



INFLUENCE OF MIND ON BODY. 39 

alyze for a time all the bodily and mental functions, or cause 
instant death. It may, again, produce epilepsy, apoplexy, or 
insanity ; while a prolonged state of depression and anxiety 
is sometimes an important agent in the causation of chronic 
disease, such as diabetes and heart-disease. Can it be 
doubted, too, that the strong belief that a bodily disorder 
will be cured by some appliance, itself innocent of good or 
harm, may so affect beneficially the nutrition of the part as 
actually to effect a cure ? To me it seems not unreasonable 
to suppose that the mind may stamp its tone, if not its very 
features, on the individual elements of the body, inspiring 
them with hope and energy, or infecting them with despair 
and feebleness. A separated portion of the body, so little 
that our naked eye can make nothing of it, the spermatozoon 
of the male and the ovum of the female, does at any rate 
contain, in a latent state, the essential characters of the 
mind and body of the individual from whom it has pro- 
ceeded ; and, as we are utterly ignorant how this myste- 
rious effect is accomplished, we are certainly not in a posi- 
tion to deny that what is true of the spermatozoon and ovum 
may be true of other organic elements. And, if this be so, 
then those who profess to discover the character of the in- 
dividual in the character of the nose, the hand the features, 
or other part of the body, may have a foundation of truth 
for speculations which are yet only vague, fanciful, and val- 
ueless. 

Perhaps we do not, as physicians, consider sufficiently the 
influence of mental states in the production of disease, and 
their importance as symptoms, or take all the advantage 
which we might take of them in our efforts to cure it. Quack- 
ery seems to have here got hold of a truth which legitimate 
medicine fails to appreciate and use adequately. Assuredly 
the most successful physician is he who, inspiring the great- 
est confidence in his remedies, strengthens and exalts the im- 
agination of his patient : if he orders a few drops of pepper- 
mint-water with the confident air of curing the disease, will 



40 BODY AND MIND. 

lie not really do more sometimes for the patient than one who 
treats him in the most approved scientific way, hut without 
inspiring a conviction of recovery ? Ceremonies, charms, ges- 
ticulations, amulets, and the like, have in all ages and among 
all nations heen greatly esteemed and largely used in the 
treatment of disease ; and it may he speciously presumed that 
they have derived their power, not from any contract with 
the supernatural, hut, as Bacon observes, by strengthening 
and exalting the imagination of him who used them. En- 
tirely ignorant as we are, and probably ever shall be, of the 
nature of mind, groping feebly for the laws of its operation, 
we certainly cannot venture to set bounds to its power over 
those intimate and insensible molecular movements which 
are the basis of all our visible bodily functions, any more than 
we can justly venture to set bounds to its action in the vast 
and ever-progressing evolution of Nature, of which all our 
thoughts and works are but a part. This much we do know : 
that as, on the one hand, in the macrocosm of Nature, it is 
certain that the true idea once evolved is imperishable — that 
it passes from individual to individual, from nation to nation, 
from generation to generation, becoming the eternal and ex- 
alting possession of man — so, on the other hand, in the mi- 
crocosm of the body, which some ignorantly despise, there 
are many more things in the reciprocal action of mind and 
organic element than are yet dreamed of in our philosophy. 



LECTURE II. 

Gentlemen : In ray last lecture I gave a general survey 
of the physiology of our mental functions, showing how in- 
dissolubly they are bound up with the bodily functions, and 
how barren must of necessity be a study of mind apart from 
body. I pointed out that the higher mental operations were 
functions of the supreme nerve-centres ; but that, though of 
a higher and more complex nature than the functions of the 
lower nerve-centres, they obeyed the same physiological laws 
of evolution, and could be best approached through a knowl- 
edge of them. I now propose to show that the phenomena 
of the derangement of mind bear out fully this view of its na- 
ture ; that we have not to deal with disease of a metaphys- 
ical entity, which the method of inductive inquiry cannot 
reach, nor the resources of the medical art touch, but with 
disease of the nervous system, disclosing itself by physical 
and mental symptoms. I say advisedly physical and mental, 
because in most, if not all, cases of insanity, at one period or 
other of their course, there are, in addition to the prominent 
mental features, symptoms of disordered nutrition and secre- 
tion, of disordered sensibility, or of disordered motility. Nei- 
ther in health nor in disease is the mind imprisoned in one 
corner of the body ; and, when a person is lunatic, he is, as 
Dr. Bucknill has remarked, lunatic to his fingers' ends. 

Mental disorders are neither more nor less than nervous dis- 
eases in which mental symptoms predominate, and their entire 
separation from other nervous diseases has been a sad hin- 



42 BODY AND MIND. 

derance to progress. When a blow on the head has paralyzed 
sensibility and movement, in consequence of the disease in 
the brain which it has initiated, the patient is sent to the 
hospital ; but when a blow on the head has caused mental 
derangement, in consequence of the disease of brain which it 
has initiated, the patient is sent to an asylum. In like man- 
ner, one man who has unluckily swallowed the eggs of a 
taenia, and has got a cysticercus in the brain, may go to the 
hospital ; another who has been similarly unlucky goes to an 
asylum. Syphilitic disease of the brain or its arteries lands 
one person in an asylum with mental symptoms predominant, 
another in a hospital with sensory and motor disorder pre- 
dominant. The same cause produces different symptoms, ac- 
cording to the part of the brain which it particularly affects. 
E~o doubt it is right that mental derangements should have, 
as they often require, the special appliances of an asylum, 
but it is certainly not right that the separation which is neces- 
sary for treatment should reach to their pathology and to the 
method of its study. So long as this is the case, we shall 
labor in vain to get exact scientific ideas concerning their 
causation, their pathology, and their treatment. 

Clearing, then, the question as completely as possible from 
the haze which metaphysics has cast around it, let us ask — 
How comes idiocy, or insanity ? What is the scientific mean- 
ing of them ? We may take it to be beyond question that 
they are not accidents; that they come to pass, as every 
other event in Nature does, by natural law. They are mys- 
terious visitations only because we understand not the laws 
of their production, appear casualties only because we are 
ignorant of their causality. When a blow on the head or an 
inflammation of the membranes of the brain has produced 
derangement of mind, we need not look farther for a cause : 
the actual harm done to structure is sufficient to account for 
disorder of function in the best-constituted and best-developed 
brain. But it is only in a small proportion of cases of insanity 
that we can discover such a direct physical occasion of disease. 



IDIOCY. 43 

In a great many cases — in more than half, certainly, and per- 
haps in five out of six — there is something in the nervous 
organization of the person, some native peculiarity, which, 
however we name it, predisposes him to an outbreak of in- 
sanity. When two persons undergo a similar moral shock, 
or a similar prolonged anxiety, and one of them goes mad in 
consequence, while the other goes to sleep and goes to work 
and recovers his equanimity, it is plain that all the cooper- 
ating conditions have not been the same, that the entire 
cause has been different. What, then, has been the differ- 
ence ? In the former case there has been present a most im- 
portant element, which was happily wanting in the latter — 
there has been a certain hereditary neurosis, an unknown and 
variable quantity in the equation. 

Perhaps of all the erroneous notions concerning mind 
which metaphysics has engendered or abetted, there is none 
more false than that which tacitly assumes or explicitly de- 
clares that men are born with equal original mental capacity, 
opportunities and education determining the differences of 
subsequent development. The opinion is as cruel as it is false. 
What man can by taking thought add one cubit either to his 
mental or to his bodily stature ? Multitudes of human beings 
come into the world weighted with a destiny against which 
they have neither the will nor the power to contend ; they are 
the step-children of Nature, and groan under the worst of all 
tyrannies — the tyranny of a bad organization. Men differ, in- 
deed, in the fundamental characters of their minds, as they do 
in the features of their countenances, or in the habits of their 
bodies; and between those who are born with the poten- 
tiality of a full and complete mental development, under fa- 
vorable circumstances, and those who are born with an 
innate incapacity of mental development, under any circum- 
stances, there exists every gradation. What teaching could 
ever raise the congenital idiot to the common level of hu- 
man intelligence? What teaching could ever keep the in- 
spired mind of the man of genius at that level? 



44 BODY AND MIND. 

The congenital idiot is deprived of his human birthright; 
for he is born with such a defect of brain that he cannot 
display any, or can only display very feeble and imperfect 
mental functions. From no fault of his own is he thus afflict- 
ed, seeing that he must be held innocent of all offence but 
the offence of his share of original sin ; but it is nowise so 
clear that it is not from some fault of his parents. It is all too 
true that, in many cases, there has observably been a neglect 
or disregard of the laws which govern the progress of human 
development through the ages. Idiocy is, indeed, a manufac- 
tured article ; and, although we are not always able to tell 
how it is manufactured, still its important causes are known 
and are within control. Many cases are distinctly traceable 
to parental intemperance and excess. Out of 300 idiots in 
Massachusetts, Dr. Howe found as many as 145 to be the off- 
spring of intemperate parents ; and there are numerous scat- 
tered observations which prove that chronic alcoholism in 
the parent may directly occasion idiocy in the child. I think, 
too, that there is no reasonable question of the ill effects of 
marriages of consanguinity : that their tendency is to pro- 
duce degeneracy of the race, and idiocy as the extremest 
form of such degeneracy. I do not say that all the children 
of such marriages may not sometimes be healthy, and some 
of them quite healthy at other times ; but the general and 
ultimate result of breeding in and in is to produce barrenness 
and sterility, children of a low degree of viability and of 
imperfect mental and physical development, deaf-mutism, and 
actual imbecility or idiocy. Again, insanity in the parent 
may issue in idiocy in the offspring, which is, so to speak, the 
natural term of mental degeneracy when it goes on un- 
checked through generations. It may be affirmed with no 
little confidence that, if the experiment of intermarrying in- 
sane persons for two or three generations were tried, the re- 
sult would be sterile idiocy and extinction of the family. 
Certain unfavorable conditions of life tend unquestionably to 
produce degeneracy of the individual ; the morbid predispo- 



DEGENERATE VARIETIES. 45 

sition so generated is then transmitted to the next generation, 
and, if the unfavorable conditions continue, is aggravated in 
it ; and thus is formed a morbid variety of the human kind, 
which is incapable of being a link in the line of progress of 
humanity. Nature puts it under the ban of sterility, and 
thus prevents the permanent degradation of the race. Morel 
has traced through four generations the family history of a 
youth who was admitted into the asylum at Kouen in a state 
of stupidity and semi-idiocy; the summary of which may 
fitly illustrate the natural course of degeneracy when it goes 
on through generations. 

First generation : Immorality, depravity, alcoholic ex- 
cess and moral degradation, in the great-grandfather, who 
was killed in a tavern-brawl. 

Second generation : Hereditary drunkenness, maniacal at- 
tacks, ending in general paralysis, in the grandfather. 

Third generation : Sobriety, but hypochondriacal tenden- 
cies, delusions of persecutions, and homicidal tendencies in 
the father. 

Fourth generation: Defective intelligence. First attack 
of mania at sixteen; stupidity, and transition to complete 
idiocy. Furthermore, probable extinction of the family ; 
for the generative functions were as little developed as those 
of a child of twelve years of age. He had two sisters who 
were both defective physically and morally, and were classed 
as imbeciles. To complete the proof of heredity in this case, 
Morel adds that the mother had a child while the father was 
confined in the asylum, and that this adulterous child showed 
no signs of degeneracy. 

When epilepsy in young children leads to idiocy, as it 
often does, we must generally look for the deep root of the 
mischief in the family neurosis. 

No one can well dispute that, in the case of such an 
extreme morbid variety as a congenital idiot is, we have to 
do with a defective nervous organization. We are still, 
however, without more than a very few exact descriptions 



46 BODY AND MIND. 

of the brains of idiots. Mr. Marshall has recently examined 
and described the brains of two idiots of European descent. 
He found the convolutions to be fewer in number, individu- 
ally less complex, broader and smoother, than in the apes : 
a In this respect," he says, "the idiots' brains are even more 
simple than that of the gibbon, and approach that of the 
baboon." The condition was the result neither of atrophy 
nor of mere arrest of growth, but consisted essentially in an 
imperfect evolution of the cerebral hemispheres or their 
parts, dependent on an arrest of development. The propor- 
tion of the weight of brain to that of body was extraordinarily 
diminished. We learn, then, that when man is born with a 
brain no higher — indeed, lower — than that of an ape, he may 
have the convolutions fewer in number, and individually less 
complex, than they are in the brain of a chimpanzee and an 
orang; the human brain may revert to, or fall below, that 
type of development from which, if the theory of Darwin be 
true, it has gradually ascended by evolution through the 
ages. 

With the defect of organ there is a corresponding defect 
of function. But there is sometimes more than a simple 
defect. A curious and interesting fact, which has by no 
means yet received the consideration w r hich it deserves, is 
that, with the appearance of this animal type of brain in 
idiocy, there do sometimes appear or reappear remarkable 
animal traits and instincts. There is a class of idiots which 
may justly be designated theroid, so like brutes are the mem- 
bers of it. The old stories of so-called wild men, such as 
Peter the wild boy, and the young savage of Aveyron, who 
ran wild in the woods and lived on acorns and whatever else 
they could pick up there, were certainly exaggerated at the 
time. These degraded beings were evidently idiots, who 
exhibited a somewhat striking aptitude and capacity for a 
wild animal life. Dr. Carpenter, however, quotes the case 
of an idiot girl, who was seduced by some miscreant, and 
who, when she was delivered, gnawed through the umbilical 



THEROID DEGENERACY. 47 

cord as some of the lower animals do. And Dr. Crichton 
Brown, of the "West Kiding Asylum, records a "somewhat 
similar case in a young woman, not an idiot naturally, but 
who had gone completely demented after insanity. She had 
been in the habit of escaping from home, and of living in 
solitude in the woods, feeding upon wild fruits or what she 
could occasionally beg at a cottage, and sleeping in the brush- 
wood. She had frequently lived in this manner for a fort- 
night at a time. During one of these absences she was 
delivered of twins ; she had sought out a sheltered hollow, 
and there, reverting to a primitive instinct, gnawed through 
the umbilical cord. The twins were alive when found two 
days after birth, but the mother was in a very exhausted 
state, having had no food or covering since her delivery. 
" We have at Salpetriere," says Esquirol, " an imbecile woman, 
who used to earn a few sous By doing rough household 
work. It has happened on several occasions that as soon as 
she got her sous she took them to a laborer, and gave herself 
up to his brutality ; but when she was pregnant she went no 
more to him." 

In the conformation and habits of other idiots the most 
careless observer could not help seeing the ape. A striking 
instance of this kind is described by Dr. ffitcjiell. Deputy 
Commissioner in Lunacy for Scotland. "I have never," he 
says, " seen a better illustration of the ape-faced idiot than in 
this case. It is not, however, the face alone that is ape- 
like. He grins, chatters, and screams like a monkey, never 
attempting a sound in any way resembling a word. He puts 
himself in the most ape-like attitude in his hunts after lice, 
and often brings his mouth to help his hands. He grasps 
what he brings to his mouth with an apish hold. His thumbs 
are but additional fingers. He has a leaping walk. He has 
heavy eyebrows, and short hair on his cheek or face. He is 
muscular, active, and not dwarfish. He sits on the floor in 
ape fashion, with his genitals always exposed. He has filthy 
habits of all kinds. He may be called an idiot of the lowest 



48 BODY AND MIND. 

order ; yet there is a mischievous brute-like intelligence in his 
eye. His head is not very small, its greatest circumference 
being twenty inches and a half, but in shape it strongly 
exhibits the ape-form of abnormality." 

Pinel has recorded the case of an idiot who was some- 
thing like a sheep, both in respect of her tastes, her mode of 
life, and the form of her head. She had an aversion to meat, 
and ate fruit and vegetables greedily, and drank nothing but 
water. Her demonstrations of sensibility, joy, or trouble, 
were confined to the repetition of the ill-articulated words, 
de, ma, dah. She alternately bent and raised her head, and 
rubbed herself against the belly of the girl who attended 
her. If she wanted to resist or express her discontent, she 
tried to butt with the crown of her head ; she was very pas- 
sionate. Her back, her loins, and shoulders, were covered 
with flexible and blackish hairs one or two inches long. She 
never could be made to sit on a chair or bench, even when at 
meals ; as soon as she was placed in a sitting posture, she 
glided on the floor. She slept on the floor in the posture of 
animals. 

There is now under care, in the West Eiding Asylum, a 
deformed idiot girl who, in general appearance and habits, 
has, according to Dr. Brown, striking features of resemblance 
to a goose ; so much so, that the nurses who received her de- 
scribed her as just like " a plucked. goose." Her father died 
in the asylum, and her mother's sister was also a patient in it 
at one time. She is four feet two inches in height, has a small 
head, and thin and scanty hair, so that the -crown of the head 
is partially bald. The eyes are large, round, prominent, and 
restless, and are frequently covered by the eyelids, as if by a 
slow, forcible effort at winking. The lower jaw is large, 
projecting more than one inch beyond the contracted upper 
jaw, and possesses an extraordinary range of anteropos- 
terior, as well as lateral, movement ; the whole configuration 
of the lower part of the face having a somewhat bill-like ap- 
pearance. The neck is unusually long and flexible, and is 



THEROID IDIOCY. 49 

capable of being bent backward so as actually to touch the 
back between the scapulse. The cutis anserina is general 
over the body, but is most marked on the back and dorsal 
aspects of the limbs, where it looks exactly as if it had been 
just deprived of feathers. The inferior angles of the scapulas 
stand prominently out, and moving freely with the movements 
of the arms have precisely the appearance of rudimentary 
wings. The girl utters no articulate sounds, but expresses 
pleasure by cackling like a goose, and displeasure by hissing 
or screeching like a goose, or perhaps like a macaw. When 
angry, she flaps her arms against her sides and beats her feet 
upon the floor. She knows her own name, and understands 
one or two short sentences, such as " Come here " and "Put 
out your hand." She recognizes the persons who attend 
upon her, and feed her, and is much agitated if touched by a 
stranger. She cannot feed herself, but swallows voraciously 
all thai is put into her mouth, showing no preference for one 
article of diet over another. She is dirty in her habits, and 
no amount of attention has improved her in this respect. 
She is very fond of her bath, cackling when she is put into it. 
and screeching when she is taken out of it.* 

It is a natural question, Whence come these animal traits 

* The following account of an idiot in the Western Counties Idiot Asy- 
lum has been communicated to me by Mr. Kenton, surgeon to the Asylum : 
She is "between 15 and 16 years old, has a very small head, but is well formed 
otherwise, and well nourished. She has little or no intellect, not being able 
to speak, and barely understanding a few signs. By careful treatment she 
has been taught to feed herself, but there her education has reached its 
limit. She has been left to herself, and watched with a view to observe her 
natural habits. When alone in the garden, she chooses a quiet spot among 
the shrubs, and, sitting down, will bene! forward with her small head be- 
tween her thighs, and occupy herself in picking imaginary insects from the 
adjacent parts of her body, pretending to pick them and to throw them 
away. She will then wander about, and finding a suitable bough, will 
swing by her hands, and then double her legs over the branch and swing 
With her head downward. She will steal any thing she fancies,; and hide it 
away; will suddenly spring upon any child near and bite and scratch it; 
and then in a moment look as demure as if she had done nothing. At cer- 
tain times she will go under the shrubs, scratch a hole with her hands in 

3 



50 BODY AND MIND. 

and instincts in man? Whence was derived the instinct 
which taught the idiot woman to gnaw through the umbilical 
cord ? Was it really the reappearance of a primitive instinct 
of animal nature — a faint echo from a far-distant past, testi- 
fying to a kinship which man has almost outgrown, or has 
grown too proud to acknowledge? No doubt such animal 
traits are marks of extreme human degeneracy, but it is no 
explanation to call them so ; degenerations come by law, and 
are as natural as natural law can make them. Instead of 
passing them by as abnormal, or, worse still, stigmatizing 
them as unnatural, it behooves us to seek for the scientific 
interpretation which they must certainly have. When we 
reflect that every human brain does, in the course of its de- 
velopment, pass through the same stages as the brains of 
other vertebrate animals, and that its transitional states re- 
semble the permanent forms of their brains ; and when we 
reflect farther, that the stages of its development in the 
womb may be considered the abstract and brief chronicle of 
a series of developments that have gone on through countless 
ages in Nature, it does not seem so wonderful, as at the first 
blush it might do, that it should, when in a condition of 
arrested development, sometimes display animal instincts. 
Summing up, as it were, in itself the leading forms of the 
vertebrate type, there is truly a brute brain within the man's; 
and when the latter stops short of its characteristic develop- 
ment as human — when it remains arrested at or below the 
level of an orang's brain — it may be presumed that it will 
manifest its most primitive functions, and no higher functions. 

the ground, sit down upon it as a cat does, then turn round and carefully 
cover the spot by scraping the earth over it with her hands. She tears her 
clothes up into strips, and hides the pieces. Mr. Kenton mentions another 
idiot under his care, who puts every thing to his nose before putting it into 
his mouth. This he does, not hastily, but deliberately, examining each 
piece of food carefully by hi3 sense of smell. He greatly dislikes butter, 
and will not eat pie-crust or any cooked food which contains butter, and he 
detects it3 presence with certainty by the sense of smell. He will not kiss 
any one till he has sniffGd at the person first. 



CEREBRAL DEVELOPMENT. 51 

I am not aware of any other considerations than those just 
adduced which offer even the glimpse of an explanation of 
the origin of these animal traits in man. We need not, how- 
ever, confine our attention to idiots only. Whence come the 
savage snarl, the destructive disposition, the obscene lan- 
guage, the wild howl, the offensive habits, displayed by some 
of the insane ? Why should a human being deprived of his 
reason ever become so brutal in character as some do, unless 
he has the brute nature within him? In most large asylums 
there is one, or more than one, example of a demented per- 
son who truly ruminates : bolting his food rapidly, he retires 
afterward to a corner, where at his leisure he quietly brings 
it up again into the mouth and masticates it as the cow does. 
I should take up a long time if I were to enumerate the 
various brute-like characteristics that are at times witnessed 
among the insane ; enough to say that some very strong facts 
and arguments in support of Mr. Darwin's views might be 
drawn from the field of morbid psychology. We may, with- 
out much difficulty, trace savagery in civilization, as we can 
trace animalism in savagery ; and, in the degeneration of in- 
sanity, in the urikinding, so to say, of the human kind, there 
are exhibited marks denoting the elementary instincts of its 
composition. 

It behooves us, as scientific inquirers, to realize distinctly 
the physical meaning of the progress of human intelligence 
from generation to generation. What structural differences 
in the brain are implied by it ? That an increasing purpose 
runs through the ages and that "the thoughts of men are 
widened with the process of the suns," no one will call in 
question ; and that this progress has been accompanied by a 
progressive development of the cerebral hemispheres, the 
convolutions of which have increased in size, number, and 
complexity, will hardly now be disputed. Whether the frag- 
ments of ancient human crania which have been discovered 
in Europe do or do not testify to the existence of a barbarous 
race that disappeared before historical time, they certainly 



52 BODY AND MIND. 

mark a race not higher than the lowest surviving human va- 
riety. Dr. Pritchard's comparison of the skulls of the same 
nation at different periods of its history led him to the con- 
clusion that the present inhabitants of Britain, " either as the 
result of many ages of great intellectual cultivation or from 
some other cause, have much more capacious brain-cases 
than their forefathers." Yet stronger evidence of a growth 
of brain with the growth of intelligence is furnished by an 
examination of the brains of existing savages. Gratiolet has 
figured and described the brain of the Hottentot Yenus, who 
was nowise an idiot. He found a striking simplicity and a 
regular arrangement of the convolution of the frontal lobes, 
which presented an almost perfect symmetry in the two 
hemispheres, involuntarily recalling the regularity and sym- 
metry of the cerebral convolutions in the lower animals. 
The brain was palpably inferior to that of a normally-de- 
veloped white woman, and could only be compared with the 
brain of a white idiotic from arrest of cerebral development. 
Mr. Marshall has also recently examined the brain of a Bush- 
woman, and has discovered like evidence of structural inferi- 
ority : the primary convolutions, although all present, were 
smaller and much less complicated than in the European ; 
the external connecting convolutions were still more remark- 
ably defective ; the secondary sulci and convolutions were 
everywhere decidedly less developed ; there was a deficiency 
of transverse commissural fibres ; and in size, and every one 
of the signs of comparative inferiority, "it leaned, as it were, 
to the higher quadrumanous forms." The developmental dif- 
ferences between this brain and the brain of a European 
were in fact of the same kind as, though less in degree than, 
those between the brain of an ape and that of a man. 
Among Europeans the average weight of the brain is greater 
in educated than in uneducated persons ; it's size — other cir- 
cumstances being equal — bearing a general relation to the 
mental power of the individual. Dr. Thurnam concludes, 
from a series of carefully-compiled tables, that while 



BRAIN-WEIGHTS. 53 

the average weight of the brain in ordinary Europeans 
is 49 oz., it was 54.7 oz. in ten distinguished men; and 
Prof. Wagner found a remarkably complex arrangement 
of the convolutions in the brains of five very eminent 
men which he examined.* Thus, then, while we take it to 
be well established that the convolutions of the human brain 
have undergone a considerable development through the ages, 
we may no less justly conclude that its larger, more numer- 
ous, and complex convolutions reproduce the higher and more 
varied mental activity to the progressive evolution of which 
their progressive increase has answered — that they manifest 
the kind of function which has determined the structure. 
The vesicular neurine has increased in quantity and in qual- 
ity, and the function of the increased and more highly-en- 
dowed structure is to display that intelligence which it un- 

*The following table is compiled from Dr. Thurnam's paper "On the 
Weight of the Human Brain " (Journal of Mental Science, April, 1866) : 

BRAIN-WEIGHTS OF DISTINGUISHED MEN. 

Ages. Oz. 

1. Cuvier, Naturalist 63 64.5 

2. Abercrombie, Physician 64 63 

3. Spurzheim, Physician 56 55.06 

4. Dirichlet, Mathematician 54 55.6 

5. De Moray, Statesman and Courtier . . . . 50 53.6 

6. Daniel Webster, Statesman 70 53.5 

7. Campbell, Lord- Chancellor .80 53.5 

8. Chalmers, celebrated Preacher ..... 67 53 

9. Fuchs, Pathologist .... ... 52 52.9 

10. Gauss, Mathematician ....... 78 52.6 

Average of ten distinguished men .... 50-70 54.7 

Brain-weights of average European men . . • "1 50-70 47 1 

Average brain-weight of male negroes . . . . . 44.3 

. " 14 congenital idiots (males) . . 42 

" 8 " " (females) . . 41.2 

Estimated brain-weight of Microcephalic idiocy (males) . . 37.5 

" (females) . 32.5 
It may be proper to add that the average weight of the adult male brain 
is 10 per cent, greater than that of the female— 100 : 90. The brains of the 
Hottentot, Bushman, and Australian are, so far as observation goes, of less 
weight than those of negroes. 



54 BODY AND MIND. 

consciously embodies. The native Australian, who is one of 
the lowest existing savages, has no words in his language to 
express such exalted ideas as justice, love, virtue, mercy; lie 
has no such ideas in his mind, and cannot comprehend them. 
The vesicular neurine which should embody them in its con- 
stitution and manifest them in its function has not been de- 
veloped in his convolutions; he is as incapable therefore of 
the higher mental displays of abstract reasoning and moral 
feeling as an idiot is, and for a like reason. Indeed, w^ere we 
to imagine a person born in this country, at this time, with 
a brain of no higher development than the brain of an Aus- 
tralian savage or a Bushman, it is perfectly certain that he 
would be more or less of an^imbecile. And the only way, I 
suppose, in which beings of so low an order of development 
could be raised to a civilized level of feeling and thought 
would be by cultivation continued through several genera- 
tions ; they would have to undergo a gradual process of hu- 
manization before they could attain to the capacity of civili- 
zation. 

Some, who one moment own freely the broad truth that 
all mental manifestations take place through the brain, go 
on, nevertheless, to straightway deny that the conscience or 
moral sensibility can be a function of organization. But, if 
all mental operations are not in this world equally functions 
of organization, I know not what warrant we have for de- 
claring any to be so. The solution of the much-vexed ques- 
tion concerning the origin of the moral sense seems to lie in 
the considerations just adduced. Are not, indeed, our moral 
intuitions results of the operation of the fundamental law of 
nervous organization by which that which is consciously ac- 
quired becomes an unconscious endowment, and is then 
transmitted as more or less of an instinct to the next genera- 
tion? They are examples of knowledge which has been 
hardly gained through the suffering and experience of the 
race, being now inherited as a natural or instinctive sensi- 
bility of the well-constituted brain of the individual. In the 



THE MORAL SENSE. 55 

matter of our moral feelings we are most truly the heirs of 
the ages. Take the moral sense, and examine the actions 
which it sanctions and those which it forbids, and thus ana- 
lyze, or, as it were, decompose, its nature, and it will he found 
that the actions which it sanctions are those which may he 
proved by sober reason to be conducive to the well-being and 
the progress of the race, and that its prohibitions fall upon 
the actions which, if freely indulged in, would lead to the 
degeneration, if not extinction, of mankind. And if we 
could imagine the human race to live back again to its ear- 
liest infancy — to go backward through all the scenes and 
experiences through whicli it has gone forward to its present 
height — and to give back from its mind and character at 
each time and circumstance, as it passed it, exactly that 
which it gained when it was there before — should we not 
find the fragments and exuvias of the moral sense lying here 
and there along the retrograde path, and a condition at the 
beginning which, whether simian or humai^ v^as bare of al 1 
true moral feeling ? * 

We are daily witnesses of, and our daily actions testify 
to, the operation of that plastic law of nervous organization 
by which separate and successive acquisitions are combined 
and so intimately blended as to constitute apparently a sin- 
gle and undecomposable faculty : we observe it in the forma- 
tion of our volitions; and we observe it, in a more simple 
and less disputable form, in the way in which combinations 
of movements that have been slowly formed by practice are 
executed finally as easily as if they were a single and sim- 
ple movement. If the moral sense — which is derived, then, 
insomuch as it has been acquired in the process of human 
development through the ages — were not more or less innate 
in the well-born individual of this age, if he were obliged to 
go, as the generations of his forefathers have gone, through 

* Foster, in his ',' Essay on Decision of Character, 1 ' makes this concep- 
tion of the individual character, almost ir> the words used ; but the applica- 
tion of it to the race, and the conclusion drawn, are of course not his. 



oQ BODY AND MIND. 

the elementary process of acquiring it, he would be very 
mucli in the position of a person who, on each occasion of 
writing his name, had to go through the elementary steps of 
learning to do so. The progressive evolution of the human 
brain is a proof that we do inherit as a natural endowment 
the labored acquisitions of our ancestors ; the added struct- 
ure represents, as it were, the embodied experience and 
memories of the race ; and there is no greater difficulty in 
believing that the moral sense may have been so formed, than 
in believing, what has long been known and is admitted on 
all hands, that the young fox or young dog inherits as an in- 
stinct the special cunning which the foxes and the dogs that 
have gone before it have had to win by hard experience. 

These remarks are not an unnecessary digression. Nor 
will they have been made in vain if they serve to fix in our 
minds the conviction that the law of progressive evolution 
and specialization of nerve-centres, which may be traced 
generally from the first appearance of nerve-tissue in the low- 
est animals to the complex structure of the nervous system 
of man, and specially from the rudimentary appearance of 
cerebral convolutions in the lower vertebrata to the numer- 
ous and complex convolutions of the human brain, does not 
abruptly cease its action at the vesicular neurine of the hemi- 
spheres, but continues in force within the intimate recesses 
of the mental organization. Moreover, they are specially to 
the purpose, seeing that they enable us to understand in some 
sort how it is that a perversion or destruction of the moral 
sense is often one of the earliest symptoms of mental derange- 
ment : as the latest and most exquisite product of mental or- 
ganization, the highest bloom of culture, it is the first to 
testify to disorder of the mind-centres. ]STot that we can de- 
tect any structural change in such case ; it is far too delicate 
for that. The wonder would, indeed, be if we could discover 
such more than microscopical changes with the instruments 
of research which we yet possess. We might almost as well 
look to discover the anatomy of a gnat with a telescope. 



INSANE NEUROSIS. 57 

I purposely selected for consideration the defective brain 
of the idiot, because it exhibits an undeniable fault of struct- 
ure, which is often plainly traceable to evil ancestral in- 
fluences. When we duly consider this, and reflect that we 
might, if we chose, arrange a series of hnman brains which 
should present a regular gradation from the brain of an ape 
to that of a well-developed European, are we not fully justi- 
fied in supposing that like unfavorable ancestral influences 
may occasion defects in the constitution or composition of 
the mind-centres which we are yet quite unable to detect ? 
We know nothing of the occult molecular movements which 
are the physical conditions of our mental operations ; we 
know little or nothing of the chemical changes which accom- 
pany them — cannot, in fact, detect the difference between 
the nerve-element of a brain exhausted by exercise and in- 
capable of further function, and that of a brain reinvigorated 
by sleep and ready for a day of energetic function ; and we 
know nothing of the intricate connection of nerve-cells in the 
hemispheres. It is plain, then, that there may be, unknown 
to us save as guessed from their efiects, the most important 
modifications in the molecular activities of nerve-element, 
changes in its chemical composition, and actual defects in the 
physical constitution of the nerve-centres. Wherefore, when 
no appreciable defect is found in the brain of one who has 
had a strong predisposition to insanity, and has ultimately 
died insane, it behooves us to forbear a hasty conclusion that 
it is a perfectly well-constituted brain. Close to us, yet in- 
accessible to our senses, there lies a domain of Nature — that 
of the infinitely little — the operations in which are as much 
beyond our present ken as are those that take place in the 
remotest regions of space, to which the eye, with all its aids, 
cannot yet reach, and of which the mind cannot conceive. 

It certainly cannot be disputed that, when nothing abnor- 
mal whatever may be discoverable in the brains of persons 
who have a strong hereditary tendency to insanity, they 
often exhibit characteristic peculiarities in their manner of 



58 BODY AND MIND. 

thought, feeling, and conduct, carrying in their physiognomy, 
bodily habit, and mental disposition, the sure marks of their 
evil heritage. These marks are, I believe, the outward and 
visible signs of an inward and invisible peculiarity of cerebral 
organization. Here, indeed, we broach a most important in- 
quiry, which has only lately attracted attention — the inquiry, 
namely, into the physical and mental signs of the degeneracy 
of the human kind. I do not mean to assert that all persons 
whose parents or blood relatives have suffered from nervous 
or mental disease exhibit mental and bodily peculiarities ; 
some may be well formed bodily and of superior natural in- 
telligence, the hereditary disposition in them not having 
assumed the character of deterioration of race ; but it admits 
of no dispute that there is what may be called an insane 
temperament or neurosis, and that it is marked by peculiari- 
ties of mental and bodily conformation. Morel, who was the 
first to indicate, and has done much to prosecute, this line of 
inquiry, looks upon an individual so constituted as containing 
in himself the germs of a morbid variety : summing up the 
pathological elements which have been manifested by his an- 
cestors, he represents the first term of a series which, if 
nothing happen to check the transmission of degenerate ele- 
ments from generation to generation, ends in the extreme 
degeneracy of idiocy, and in extinction of the family. 

What are the bodily and mental marks of the insane 
temperament ? That there are such is most certain ; for 
although the varieties of this temperament cannot yet be 
described with any precision, no one who accustoms himself 
to observe closely will fail to be able to say positively, in 
many instances, whether an insane person, and even a sane 
person in some instances, comes of an insane family or not. 
An irregular and unsymmetrical conformation of the head, a 
want of regularity and harmony of the features, and, as Morel 
holds, malformations of the external ear, are sometimes ob- 
served. Convulsions are apt to occur in early life, and there 
are tics, grimaces, or other spasmodic movements of muscles 



THE INSANE TEMPERAMENT. 59 

of face, eyelids, or lips, afterward. Stammering and defects 
of pronunciation are also sometimes signs of the neurosis. 
In other cases there are peculiarities of the eyes, which, 
though they may be full and prominent, have a vacillating 
movement, and a vacantly-abstracted, or half-fearful, half- 
suspicious, and distrustful look. There may, indeed, be 
something in the eye wonderfully suggestive of the look of an 
animal. The walk and manner are uncertain, and, though 
not easily described in words, may be distinctly peculiar. 
With these bodily traits are associated peculiarities of thought, 
feeling, and conduct. Without being insane, a person who 
has the insane neurosis strongly marked is thought to be 
strange, queer, and not like other persons. He is apt to see 
things under novel aspects, or to think about them under 
novel relations, which would not have occurred to an ordinary 
mortal. Punning on words is, I am inclined to think, some- 
times an indication of the temperament, and so also that 
higher kind of wit which startles us with the use of an idea 
in a double sense ; of both which aptitudes no better example 
can be given than that of Charles Lamb. His case, too, may 
show that the insane temperament is compatible with, and 
indeed it not seldom coexists with, considerable genius. Even 
those who have it in a more marked form often exhibit re- 
markable special talents and aptitudes, such as an extraor- 
dinary talent for music, or for calculation, or a prodigious 
memory for details, when they may be little better than im- 
becile in other things. There is, indeed, a marked instinctive 
character in all they think and do ; they seem not to need or 
to be able to reflect upon their own mental states. At one 
time unduly elated, at another time depressed without ap- 
parent cause, they are prone to do things differently from 
the rest of the world ; and now and then they do whimsical 
and seemingly quite purposeless acts, especially under con- 
ditions of excitement, when the impulses springing out of the 
unconscious morbid nature surprise and overpower them. 
Indeed, the mental balance may be easily upset altogether by 



60 BODY AND MIND. 

any great moral shock, or by the strain of continued anxiety. 
A great physical change in the system, too, such as is caused 
by the development of puberty, by the puerperal state, and 
the climacteric change, is not without danger to their mental 
stability. The effects of alcohol on such persons are in some 
respects special : it does not make them so much drunk as 
mad for the time being ; and I think it will be found in most, 
if not all, cases of insanity caused by alcohol that there has 
been a predisposition to it. 

I have sketched generally the features of the insane 
temperament, but there are really several varieties of it which 
need to be observed and described. In practice we meet 
with individuals representing every gradation from the mild- 
est form of the insane temperament down to actual idiocy. 
These cases ought to be arranged in groups according to their 
affinities, for until this be done we shall not make much real 
progress toward exact scientific notions respecting the causa- 
tion and pathology of insanity. One group might consist of 
those egotistic beings, having the insane neurosis, who mani- 
fest a peculiar morbid suspicion of every thing and every- 
body ; they detect an interested or malicious motive in the 
most innocent actions of others, always looking out for an 
evil interpretation ; and even events they regard as in a sort 
of conspiracy against them. Incapable of altruistic reflec- 
tion and true sympathies, they live a life of solitude and self- 
brooding, intrenched within their morbid self-feeling, until the 
discord between them and the world is so great that there is 
nothing for it but to count them mad. Another group might 
be made of those persons of unsound mental temperament 
who are born with an entire absence of the moral sense, 
destitute of the possibility even of moral feeling ; they are 
as truly insensible to the moral relations of life, as defi- 
cient in this regard, as a person color-blind is to certain 
colors, or as one who is without ear for music is to the finest 
harmonies of sound. Although there is usually conjoined 
with this absence of moral sensibility more or less weakness 






MORAL DEFECTS. 61 

of mind, it does happen in some instances that there is a re- 
markably acute intellect of the cunning type. 

The observations of intelligent prison-surgeons are tend- 
ing more and more to prove that a considerable proportion 
of criminals are weak-minded or epileptic, or come of families 
in which insanity, epilepsy, or some other neurosis, exists. 
Mr. Thompson, surgeon to the General Prison of Scotland, 
has gone so far recently as to express his conviction that the 
principal business of prison-surgeons must always be with 
mental defects or disease ; that the diseases and causes of 
death among prisoners are chiefly of the nervous system; 
and, in fine, that the treatment of crime is a branch of psy- 
chology. He holds that there is among criminals a distinct 
and incurable criminal class, marked by peculiar low physical 
and mental characteristics; that crime is hereditary in the 
families of criminals belonging to this class; and that this 
hereditary crime is a disorder of mind, having close relations 
of nature and descent to epilepsy, dipsomania, insanity, and 
other forms of degeneracy. Such criminals are really morbid 
varieties, and often exhibit marks of physical degeneration — 
spinal deformities, stammering, imperfect organs of speech, 
club-foot, cleft-palate, hare-lip, deafness, paralysis, epilepsy, 
and scrofula. Moreau relates a striking case, which is of in- 
terest as indicating the alliance between morbid or degenerate 
varieties, and which I may quote here. 

Mrs. D , aged thirty-two. Her grandfather kept an 

inn at the time of the great French [Revolution, and during 
the Eeign of Terror he had profited by the critical situation 
in which many nobles of the department found themselves to 
get them secretly into his house, where he was believed to 
have robbed and murdered them. His daughter, who was in 
his secrets, having quarrelled with him, denounced him to 
the authorities, but he escaped conviction from want of proofs, 
f She subsequently committed suicide. One of her brothers 
had nearly murdered her with a knife on one occasion, and 
another brother hanged himself. Her sister was epileptic, 



r. 



62 BODY AND MIND. 

imbecile, and paroxysmally violent. Her daughter, the pa- 
tient, after swimming in the head, noises in the ears, flashes 
before the eyes, became deranged, fancying that people were 
plotting against her, purchasing arms and barricading herself 
in her room, and was finally put in an asylum. Thus there 
were, in different members of this family, crime, melancholia, 
epilepsy, suicide, and mania. Need we wonder at it? The 
moral element is an essential part of a complete and sound 
character ; he who is destitute of it, being unquestionably to 
that extent a defective being, is therefore on the road to, or 
marks, race degeneracy ; and it is not a matter of much won- 
der that his children should, when better influences do not 
intervene to check the morbid tendency, exhibit a further de- 
gree of degeneracy, and be actual morbid varieties. I think 
that no one who has studied closely the causation of insanity 
will question this mode of production. 

I could not, if I would, in the present state of knowledge, 
describe accurately all the characteristics of the insane neu- 
rosis, and group according to their affinities the cases testify- 
ing to its influence. The chief concern now with its morbid 
peculiarities is to point out, first, that they mark some inher- 
ited fault of brain-organization ; and, secondly, that the cause 
of such fault is not insanity alone in the parent, but may be 
other nervous disease, such as hysteria, epilepsy, alcoholism, 
paralysis, and neuralgia of all kinds. Except in the case of 
suicidal insanity, it is not usual for the parent to transmit to 
the child the particular form of mental derangement from 
which he has suffered : insanity inihe parent may be epilepsy 
in the child, and epilepsy in the parent insanity in the child ; 
and, in families where a strong tendency to insanity exists, 
one member may be insane, another epileptic, a third may 
suffer from severe neuralgia, and a fourth may commit sui- 
cide. The morbid conditions which affect the motor nerve- 
centres in one generation seem to concentrate themselves 
sometimes upon the sensory or the ideational centres in an- 
other. In truth, nervous disease is a veritable Proteus, dis- 



TRANSITORY FURY. 63 

appearing in one form to reappear in another, and, it may be, 
capriciously skipping one generation to fasten npon the next. 

The different forms of insanity that occur in young chil- 
dren — as all forms of it except general paralysis may do — are 
almost always traceable to nervous disease in the preceding 
generation, a neuropathic condition being really the essential 
element in their causation. The cases of acute mania in chil- 
dren of a few weeks or a few years old, which have been de- 
scribed, might more properly be classed as examples of idiocy 
with excitement. There can be no true mania until there is 
some mind. But we do meet sometimes in older children 
with a genuine acute mania, occurring usually in connection 
with chorea or epilepsy, and presenting the symptoms, if I 
may so express it, of a mental chorea or an epilepsy of the 
mind, but without the spasmodic and convulsive movements 
of these diseases. More or less dulness of intelligence and 
apathy of movement, giving the seeming of a degree of imbe- 
cility, is common enough in chorea, and in some cases there 
is violent delirium ; but, besides these cases, there are others 
in which, without choreic disorder of movements, there is a 
choreic mania : it is an active delirium of ideas which is the 
counterpart of the usual delirium of movements, and its auto- 
matic character and its marked incoherence are striking 
enough to an ordinary observer. Hallucinations of the spe- 
cial senses, and loss or perversion of general sensibility, usu- 
ally accompany the delirium, the disorder affecting the cen- 
tres of special and general sensation, as well as the mind-cen- 
tres. 

Between this choreic mania and epileptic mania there are 
intermediate conditions partaking more or less of the charac- 
ter of one or the other — hybrid forms of a cataleptic nature. 
The child will lie for hours or days in a seeming ecstasy or 
trance, with its limbs rigid or fixed in a strange posture. 
There may be apparent insensibility to impressions, while at 
other times vague answers are given, or there is a sudden 
bursting out into wild shrieks or incoherent raving. If this 



64 BODY AND MIXD. 

be of a religious kind, the child is apt to be thought by ig- 
norant persons to be inspired. The attacks are of variable 
duration, and are repeated at varying intervals. On the one 
hand, they pass into attacks of chorea; and, on the other 
hand, into true epileptic seizures, or alternate with them. 

In children, as in adults, a brief attack of violent mania, 
a genuine mania transitoria, may precede, or follow, or take 
the place of an epileptic fit ; in the latter case being a masked 
epilepsy. Children of three or four years of age are some- 
times seized with attacks of violent shrieking, desperate 
stubbornness, or furious rage, when they bite, tear, kick, and 
do all the destruction they can ; these seizures, which are a 
sort of vicarious epilepsy, come on periodically, and may 
either pass in the course of a few months into regular epilepsy, 
or may alternate with it. Older children have perpetrated 
crimes of a savage and determined nature — incendiarism and 
even murder — under the influence of similar attacks of tran- 
sitory fury, followed or not by epileptic convulsions. It is of 
the utmost importance to realize the deep effect which the 
epileptic neurosis may have on the moral character, and' to 
keep' in mind the possibility of its existence when a savage, 
apparently motiveless, and unaccountable crime has been 
committed. A single epileptic seizure has been known to 
change entirely the moral character, rendering a child rude, 
vicious, and perverse, who was hitherto gentle, amiable, and 
tractable. JNo one who has seen it can fail to have been 
struck with the great and abrupt change in moral character 
which takes place in the asylum epileptic immediately before 
the recurrence of his fits ; iu the intervals between them he 
is often an amiable, obliging, and industrious being, but when 
they impend he becomes sullen, morose, and most dangerous 
to meddle with. JSTot an attendant but can then foretell that 
he is going to have his fits, as confidently almost as he can 
foretell that the sun will rise next day. Morel has made the 
interesting observation, which is certainly well founded, that 
the epileptic neurosis may exist for a considerable period iu 



INSANE NEUROSIS. 65 

an undeveloped or masked form, showing itself, not by con- 
vulsions, but by periodic attacks of mania, or by manifesta- 
tions of extreme moral perversion, which are apt to be 
thought wilful viciousness. But they are not : no moral in- 
fluence will touch them; they depend upon a morbid physical 
condition, which can only have a physical cure ; and they 
get their explanation, and indeed justification, afterward, 
when actual epilepsy occurs. 

The epileptic neurosis is certainly most closely allied to the 
insane neurosis ; and when it exists in its masked form, af- 
fecting the mind for some time before convulsions occur, it is 
hardly possible to distinguish it from one form of the insane 
neurosis. The difficulty of doing so is made greater, inas- 
much as epilepsy in the parent may engender the insane 
neurosis in the child, and insanity in the parent the epileptic 
neurosis in the child. A character which the insane neurosis 
has in common with the epileptic neurosis is, that it is apt to 
burst out in a convulsive explosion of violence ; that when 
it develops into actual insanity it displays itself in deeds 
rather than in words — in an insanity of action rather than 
of thought. It is truly a neurosis spasmodica. Take, for ex- 
ample, a case which is one of a class, that of the late Alton 
murderer, who, taking a walk one fine afternoon, met some 
little girls at play, enticed one of them into a neighboring 
hop-garden, there murdered her and cut her body into frag- 
ments, which he scattered about, returned quietly home, 
openly washing his hands in the river on the way, made an 
entry in his diary, " Killed a little girl ; it was fine and hot ;" 
and, when forthwith taken into custody, confessed what he 
had done, and could give no reason for doing it. At the trial 
it was proved that his father had had an attack of acute 
mania, and that another near relative was in confinement, 
suffering from homicidal mania. He himself had been noted 
as peculiar; he had been subject to fits of depression, been 
prone to weep without apparent reason, and had exhibited 
singular caprices of conduct ; and it had once been necessary 



66 BODY AND MIND. 

to watch him from fear that he might commit suicide. He 
was not insane in the legal or the ordinary sense of the 
term, hut he certainly had the insane neurosis, and it may he 
presumed confidently that he would, had he lived, have he- 
come insane. 

f Those who have practical experience of insanity know 
well that there is a most distressing form of the disease ; in 
which a desperate impulse to commit suicide or homicide 
overpowers and takes prisoner the reason. The terrible im- 
pulse is deplored sometimes by him who suffers from it as 
deeply as by any one who witnesses it ; it causes him unspeak- 
able distress ; he is fully conscious of itsjoature, and struggles 
in vain against it ; his reason is no further affected than in 
having lost power to control, or having become the slave of, 
the morbid and convulsive impulse. It may be that this form 
of derangement does sometimes occur where there is no he- 
reditary predisposition to insanity, but there can be no doubt 
that in the great majority of cases of the kind there is such a 
neuropathic state. The impulse is truly a convulsive idea, 
springing from a morbid condition of nerve-element, and it 
is strictly comparable with an epileptic convulsion. How 
grossly unjust, then, the judicial criterion of responsibility 
which dooms an insane person of this class to death if he 
knew what he was doing when he committed a murder ! It 
were as reasonable to hang a man for not stopping by an act 
of will a convulsion of which he was conscious. An interest- 
ing circumstance in connection with this morbid impulse is 
that its convulsive activity is sometimes preceded by a feeling 
very like the aura epileptica — a strange morbid sensation, 
beginning in some part of the body, and rising gradually to I 
the brain. The patient may accordingly give warning of the 
impending attack in some instances, and in one case was 
calmed by having his thumbs loosely tied together with a 
ribbon when the forewarning occurred. Dr. Skae records an 
instructive example in one of his annual reports. The feeling 
began at the toes, rose gradually to the chest, producing a 



AURA EPILEPTICA. 67 

sense of faintness and constriction, and then to the head, pro- 
ducing a momentary loss of consciousness. This aura was 
accompanied by an involuntary jerking — first of the legs, and 
then of the arms. It was when these attacks came on that 
the patient felt impelled to commit some act of violence 
against others or himself. On one occasion he attempted to 
commit suicide by throwing himself into the water ; more 
often the impulse was to attack others. He deplored his con- 
dition, of which he spoke with great intelligence, giving all the 
details of his past history and feelings. In other cases a feeling^ 
of vertigo, a trembling, and a vague dread of something fear- f 
ful being about to happen, resembling the vertigo and mo-1 
mentary vague despair of one variety of the epileptic aura, * 
precede the attack. Indeed, whenever a murder has been 
committed suddenly, without premeditation, without malice, 
without motive, openly, and in a way quite different from 
the way in which murders are commonly done, we ought to 
look carefully for evidence of previous epilepsy, and, should 
there have been no epileptic fits, for evidence of an aura epi- 
leptica and other symptoms allied to epilepsy. 

It is worth while observing that in other forms of insanity, 
when we look closely into the symptoms, there are not un- 
frequently complaints of strange, painful, and distressing 
sensations in some part of the body, which appear to have a 
relation to the mental derangement not unlike that which 
the epileptic aura has to the epileptic fit. Common enough 
is a distressing sensation about the epigastrium : it is not a 
definite pain, is not comparable strictly to a burning, or 
weight, or to any known sensation, but is an indescribable 
feeling of distress to which the mental troubles are referred. 
It sometimes rises to a pitch of anguish, when it abolishes the 
power to think, destroys the feeling of identity, and causes 
such unspeakable suffering and despair that suicide is at- 
tempted or accomplished. In other cases the distressing and 
indescribable sensation is in the crown of the head or down 
the spine, and sometimes it arises from the pelvic organs. In 



68 BODY AND MIND. 

all cases the patients connect their mental trouble with it, 
regarding it as the cause of the painful confusion of thought, 
the utter inability of exertion, the distressing ideas, and the 
paroxysm of despair. Perhaps they exaggerate its impor- 
tance ; but there can be little doubt that writers on mental 
disorders, too exclusively occupied with the prominent men- 
tal features, have not hitherto given sufficient attention to 
these anomalous sensations. We have been apt to class them 
as hypochondriacal, and to pass them over as of no special 
significance ; but I cannot help thinking that, properly studied, 
they may sometimes teach us more of the real nature of the 
particular form of insanity — of its probable course, termina- 
tion, and its most suitable treatment — than many much more 
obtrusive symptoms. 

In bringing this lecture to an end, I may fitly point out 
how entirely thus far the observation of the phenomena of de- 
fective and disordered mind proves their essential dependence 
on defective and disordered brain, and how closely they are 
related to some other disordered nervous functions. The insane 
neurosis which the child inherits in consequence of its par- 
ent's insanity is as surely a defect of physical nature as is 
the epileptic neurosis to which it is so closely allied. It is an 
indisputable though extreme fact that certain human beings 
are born with such a native deficiency of mind that all the 
training and education in the world will not raise them to 
the height of brutes ; and I believe it to be not less true that" 
in consequence of evil ancestral influences, individuals are 
born with such a flaw or warp of Nature that all the care in 
the world will not prevent them from being vicious or crimi- 
nal, or becoming insane. Education, it is true, may do 
much, and the circumstances of life may do much ; but we" 
| cannot forget that the foundations on which the acquisitions 
' of education must rest are not acquired, but inheritedXTfo" 
one can escape the tyranny of his organization ; no one can 
elude the destiny that is innate in him, and which uncon- 
soiously and irresistibly shapes his ends, even when he be- 



TYRANNY OF ORGANIZATION. 69 

lieves that lie is determining them with consummate fore- 
sight and skill. A well-grounded and comprehensive theory 
of mind must recognize and embrace these facts ; they meet 
us every moment of our lives, and cannot be ignored if we 
are in earnest in our attempts to construct a mental science ; 
and it is because metaphysical mental philosophy has taken 
no notice whatever of them, because it is bound by the prin- 
ciple of its existence as a philosophy to ignore them, that, 
notwithstanding the labor bestowed on it, it has borne no 
fruits — that, as Bacon said of it, " not only what was asserted 
once is asserted still, but what were questions once are ques- 
tions still, and, instead of being resolved by discussion, are 
only fixed and fed.' 7 



LECTURE III. 

Gentlemen : In my last lecture I showed how large a 
part in the production of insanity is played by the hereditary 
neurosis, and pointed out the necessity of scrutinizing more 
closely than has yet been done the features of the different 
forms of mental derangement that own its baneful influence. 
Past all question it is the most important element in the 
causation of insanity. It cannot be in the normal order of 
events that a healthy organism should be unable to bear or- 
dinary mental trials, much less a natural physiological func- 
tion such as the evolution of puberty, the puerperal state, or 
the climacteric change. When, therefore, the strain of grief 
or one of these physiological conditions becomes the occa- 
sion of an outbreak of insanity, we must look for the root of 
the ill in some natural infirmity or instability of nerve-ele- 
ment. Not until we apply ourselves earnestly to an exact 
observation and discrimination of all the mental and bodily 
conditions which cooperate in the causation, and are mani- 
fested in the symptoms, of the manifold varieties of insanity, 
shall we render more precise and satisfactory our knowledge 
of its causes, its classification, and its treatment. How un- 
scientific it appears when we reflect, to enumerate, as is com- 
monly done, sex and age among its predisposing causes ! No 
one goes mad because he or she happens to be a man or a 
woman, but because to each sex, and at certain ages, there 
occur special physiological changes, which are apt to run into 
pathological effects in persons predisposed to nervous dis- 



HYSTERICAL INSANITY. 71 

order. How often it happens that a moral cause of insanity 
is sought and falsely found in a state of mind such as grief 
or jealousy, which is really an early symptom of the disease! 
Again, how vague and unsatisfactory the accepted psycho- 
logical classification of insanity, under which forms of dis- 
ease distinct enough to claim separate descriptions are in- 
cluded in the same class ! It is obvious that we learn very 
little of value from an account of the treatment of mania 
generally when there are included under the class diseases so 
different as puerperal mania, the mania of general paralysis, 
syphilitic, epileptic, and hysterical mania, each presenting 
features and requiring treatment in some degree special. 
The hope and the way of advance in our knowledge of men- 
tal disorders lie in the exact observation of the varieties of 
the insane diathesis, and of the effects of bodily functions 
and disorders upon these ; in noting carefully the bodily as 
well as mental symptoms that characterize the several forms 
of derangement of mind ; and in tracing the relations of 
mental to other disorders of the nervous system. We must 
aim to distinguish well if we would teach well — to separate 
the cases that exhibit special features and relations, and to 
arrange them in groups or classes according to their affinities, 
just as we do habitually with general paralysis, and as I did 
in my last lecture with epileptic mania. 

Following this plan, we might in like manner make of 
hysterical insanity a special variety. An attack of acute 
maniacal excitement, with great restlessness, rapid and dis- 
connected but not entirely incoherent conversation, some- 
times tending to the erotic or obscene, evidently without 
abolition of consciousness ; laughing, singing, or rhyming, 
and perverseness of conduct, which is still more or less cohe- 
rent and seemingly wilful — may occur in connection with, or 
instead of, the usual hysterical convulsions. Or the ordinary 
hysterical symptoms may pass by degrees into chronic insanity. 
Loss of power of will is a characteristic symptom of hysteria\ 
in all its Protean forms, and with the perverted sensations 



Y2 BODY AND MIND. 

and disordered movements there is always some degree of 
moral perversion. This increases until it swallows up the 
other symptoms : the patient loses more and more of her 
energy and self-control, becoming capriciously fanciful about 
her health, imagining or feigning strange diseases, and keep- 
ing up the delusion or the imposture with a pertinacity that 
might seem incredible, getting more and more impatient of 
the advice and interference of others, and indifferent to the 
interests and duties of her position. Outbursts of temper 
become almost outbreaks of mania, particularly at the men- 
strual periods. An erotic tinge may be observable in her 
manner of behavior; and occasionally there are quasi- 
ecstatic or cataleptic states. It is an easily-curable form of 
derangement if the patient be removed in time from the anx- 
ious but hurtful sympathies and attentions of her family, and 
placed under good moral control ; but, if it be allowed to go 
on unchecked, it will end in dementia, and it is especially apt 
to do so when there is a marked hereditary predisposition. 

In some instances we observe a curious connection be- 
tween insanity and neuralgia, not unlike that which, existing 
between epilepsy and a special form of neuralgia, induced 
Trousseau to describe the latter as epileptiform. I have un- 
der observation now a lady who suffered for some time from 
an intense neuralgia of the left half of the face ; after the 
removal of a tooth suspected to be at the root of the mis- 
chief the pain ceased, but an attack of melancholia immedi- 
ately followed. Griesinger mentions a similar case of a gen- 
tleman under his care, in whom a double occipital neuralgia 
was followed by a melancholic state of mind. In his " Com- 
mentaries on Insanity," Dr. Burrows tells of a very eloquent 
divine who was always maniacal when free from pains in the 
spine, and sane when the pains returned to that site. And 
the late Sir B. Brodie mentions two cases of a similar kind : 
in one of them a neuralgia of the vertebral column alter- 
nated with true insanity. These cases appear to be instances 
of the transference of morbid action from one nerve-centre to 



TRANSFORMATION OF NEUROSES. 73 

another, such as Dr. Darwin formerly noticed and commented 

on. "Mrs. C ," he says, "was seized every day, about 

the same hour, with violent pain in the right side of her bow- 
els, about the situation of the lower edge of the liver, with- 
out fever, which increased for an hour or two, till it became 
quite intolerable. After violent screaming she fell into con- 
vulsions, which terminated sometimes in fainting, with or 
without stertor, as in common epilepsy ; at other times a 
temporary insanity supervened, which continued about half 
an hour, and the fit ceased." It seems not unreasonable to 
suppose that the morbid action in the sensory centres, which 
the violent neuralgia implied, was at one time transferred to 
the motor centres, giving rise to convulsive movements, and 
at another time to the mind-centres, giving rise to convulsive 
ideas. There is a form of neuralgia which is the analogue of 
a convulsion, and there is a mania which is the counterpart, 
in the highest nerve-centres, of neuralgia and convulsions in 
their respective centres. Perhaps if we had the power in 
some cases of acute insanity to induce artificially a violent 
neuralgia, or general convulsions — to transfer the morbid ac- 
tion from the mind-centres — we might, for the time being at 
any rate, cure the insanity. 

I pass on now to exhibit the effects of organic sympathies 
in the causation of mental disorders, or rather the specific 
effects of particular organs upon the features of different 
forms of insanity. In my first lecture I pointed out that 
there is the closest physiological consent of functions be- 
tween the different organs ; that the brain, as the organ of 
mind, joins in this consent ; and that our ideas and feelings 
are obtained by the concurrence of impressions from the 
internal organs of the body and the external organs of the 
senses. The consequence is, that derangement of an internal 
organ, acting upon the brain, may engender, by pathological 
sympathy, morbid feelings and their related ideas. The 
mental effects may be general or specific : a general emotionar 
depression through which all ideas loom gloomy, of which 
4 



74 BODY AND MIND. 

every one's experience testifies; and a special morbid feeling 
with its particular sympathetic ideas, of which the phenom- 
ena of dreaming and insanity yield illustrations. 

The slight shades of this kind of morbid influence we can- 
not venture to trace ; but it is easy to recognize the most 
marked effects. Take, for example, the irritation of ovaries 
or uterus, which is sometimes the direct occasion of nympho- 
mania — a disease by which the most chaste and modest 
woman is transformed into a raging fury of lust. Some ob- 
servers have, without sufficient reason I think, made of 
nympliomania a special variety, grouping under the term 
cases in which it was a prominent- symptom. But it certainly 
occurs in forms of mania that are quite distinct — in puerperal 
mania, for example, in epileptic mania, and in the mania 
sometimes met with in old women; and the cases in which 
it does occur have not such characteristic features as warrant 
the formation of a definite group. "We have, indeed, to note 
and bear in mind how often sexual ideas and feelings arise 
and display themselves in all sorts of insanity ; how they 
connect themselves with ideas which in a normal mental 
state have no known relation to them ; so that it seems as 
inexplicable that a virtuous person should ever have learned, 
as it is distressing that she should manifest, so much obscenity 
of thought and feeling. Perhaps it is that such ideas are ex- 
cited sympathetically in a morbidly active brain by unrelated 
ideas, just as, in other nervous disorders, sympathetic morbid 
sensations and movements occur in parts distant from the 
seat of the primary irritation. Considering, too, what an 
important agent in the evolution of mind the sexual feeling 
is, how much of thought, feeling, and energy it remotely in- 
spires, there is less cause for wonder at the naked interven- 
tion of its simple impulses in the phenomena of mania, when 
coordination of function is abolished in the supreme centres, 
and the mind resolved, as it were, into its primitive auimal 
elements. This should teach us to take care not to attribute 
too hastily the sexual feelings to a morbid irritation of the 



INSANITY OF PUBESCENCE. 75 

sexual organs. It is plain that they may have a purely cen- 
tral origin, just as the excitation of them in health may pro- 
ceed from the mind. Here, in fact, as in other cases, we 
must bear in mind the reciprocal influence of mind on organ, 
and of organ on mind. 

The great mental revolution which occurs at puberty may 
go beyond its physiological limits, in some instances, and 
become pathological. The vague feelings, blind longings, and 
obscure impulses, which then arise in the mind, attest the 
awakening of an impulse which knows not at first its aim or 
the means of its gratification ; a kind of vague and yearning 
melancholy is engendered, which leads to an abandonment to 
poetry of a gloomy Byronic kind, or to indulgence in inde- 
finite religious feelings and aspirations. There is a want of 
some object to fill the void in the feelings, to satisfy the 
undefined yearning — a need of something to adore; con- 
sequently, where there is no visible object of worship the 
invisible is adored. The time of this mental revolution is, at 
best, a trying period for youth ; and, where there is an in- 
herited infirmity of nervous organization, the natural dis- 
turbance of the mental balance may easily pass into actual 
destruction of it. 

The form of derangement connected with this period of 
life I believe to be either a fanciful and quasi-hysterical 
melancholia, which is not very serious when it is properly 
treated; or an acute mania, which is apt to be recurrent, and 
is much more serious. The former occurs especially in girls, 
if it be not peculiar to them ; there are periods of depression 
and paroxysms of apparently causeless weeping, alternating 
with times of undue excitability, more especially at the 
menstrual periods ; a disinclination is evinced to work, to 
rational amusement, to exertion of any kind ; the behavior is 
capricious, and soon becomes perverse and wilful ; the natural 
affections seem to be blunted or abolished, the patient taking 
pleasure in distressing those whose feelings she would most 
consider when in health ; and, although there are no fixed 



76 BODY AND MIND. 

delusions, there are unfounded suspicions or fears and chan- 
ging morbid fancies. The anxious sympathies of those most 
dear are apt to foster the morbid self-feeling which craves 
them, and thus to aggravate the disease : what such patients 
need to learn is, not the indulgence but a forgetfulness of 
their feelings, not the observation but the renunciation of 
self, not introspection but useful action. In some of these 
cases, where the disease has become chronic, delusions of 
sexual origin occur, and the patient whose virginity is intact 
imagines that she is pregnant or has had a baby. 

The morbid self-feeling that has its root in the sexual sys- 
tem is not unapt to take on a religious guise. We observe 
examples of this in certain members of those latter-day reli- 
gious sects which profess to commingle religion and love, and 
which especially abound in America. No physiologist can 
well doubt that the holy kiss of love in such cases owes all 
its warmth to the sexual feeling which consciously or uncon- 
sciously inspires it, or that the mystical union of the sexes 
lies very close to a union that is nowise mystical, when it does 
not lead to madness. A similar intimate connection between 
fanatical religious exaltation and sexual excitement is exem- 
plified by the lives of such religious enthusiasts as St.- Theresa 
and St. Catherine de Sienne, whose nightly trances and 
visions, in which they believed themselves received as verita- 
ble spouses into the bosom of Christ and transported into an 
unspeakable ecstasy by the touch of His sacred lips, attested, 
though they knew it not, the influence of excited sexual or- 
gans on the mind. More extreme examples of a like patho- 
logical action are afforded by those insane women who be- 
lieve themselves to be visited by lovers or ravished by perse- 
cutors during the night. Sexual hallucinations, betraying 
an ovarian or uterine excitement, might almost be described 
as the characteristic feature of the insanity of old maids ; the 
false visions of unreal indulgence being engendered probably 
in the same way as visions of banquets occur in the dreams 
of a starving person, or. as visions of cooling streams to one 



PERIODIC INSANITY. 77 

who is perishing of thirst. It seems to he the fact that, al- l 
though women hear sexual excesses hetter than men, they , 
suffer more than men do from the entire deprivation of sexual] 
intercourse. 

The development of puberty may lead indirectly to insanity 
hy becoming the occasion of a vicious habit of self-abuse in 
men ; and it is not always easy to say in such cases how much 
of the evil is due to pubescence and how much to self-abuse. 
But the form of mental derangement directly traceable to 
self-abuse has certainly characteristic features. There are 
no acute symptoms, the onset of the disease being most grad- 
ual. The patient becomes offensively egotistic and impracti-j 
cable; he is full of self-feeling and self-conceit; insensible 
to the claims of others upon him, and of his duties to them ; 
interested only in hypochondriacal^ watching his morbid 
sensations, and attending to his morbid feelings. His mental 
energy is sapped; and though he has extravagant pretensions, 
and often speaks of great projects engendered by his con- 
ceit, he never works systematically for any aim, but exhibits 
an incredible vacillation of conduct, and spends his days in 
indolent and suspicious self-brooding. His relatives he thinks 
hostile to him, because they do not take the interest in his 
sufferings which he craves, nor yield sufficiently to his pre- 
tensions, but perhaps urge him to some kind of work ; he is 
utterably incapable of conceiving that he has duties to them. J 
As matters get worse, the general suspicion of the hostility 
of people takes more definite form, and delusions spring up 
that persons speak offensively of him, or watch him in the 
street, or comment on what passes in his mind, or play tricks 
upon him by electricity or mesmerism, or in some other mys- 
terious way. His delusions are the objective explanation, 
by wrong imagination, of the perverted feelings. Messages 
may be received from Heaven by peculiar telegraphic signals ; 
and there are occasionally quasi-cataleptic trances. It is 
strange what exalted feelings and high moral and religious 
aims these patients will often declare they have, who, incapa- 



78 BODY AND MIND. 

ble of reforming themselves, are ready to reform the world. 
A later and worse stage is one of moody or vacant self-ab- 
sorption, and of extreme loss of mental power. They are 
silent, or, if they converse, they discover delusions of a sus- 
picious or obscene character, the perverted sexual passion 
still giving the color to their thoughts. They die miserable 
wrecks at the last. This is a form of insanity which certainly 
has its special exciting cause and its characteristic features ; 
nevertheless, I think that self-abuse seldom, if ever, produces 
it without the cooperation of the insane neurosis. 

The monthly activity of the ovaries which marks the ad- 
vent of puberty in women has a notable effect upon the mind 
and body ; wherefore it may become an important cause of 
mental and physical derangement. Most women at that 
time are susceptible, irritable, and capricious, any cause of 
vexation affecting them more seriously than usual ; and 
some who have the insane neurosis exhibit a disturbance of 
mind which amounts almost to disease. A sudden suppres- 
sion of the menses has produced a direct explosion of insan- 
ity ; or, occurring some time before an outbreak, it may be 
an important link in its causation. It is a matter also of com- 
mon experience in asylums, that exacerbations of insanity 
often take place at the menstrual periods ; but whether there 
is a particular variety of mental derangement connected with 
disordered menstruation, and, if so, what are its special fea- 
tures, we are not yet in a position to say positively. There is 
certainly a recurrent mania, which seems sometimes to have, 
in regard to its origin and the times of its attacks, a relation 
to the menstrual function, suppression or irregularity of 
which often accompanies it ; and it is an obvious presump- 
tion that the mania may be a sympathetic morbid effect of 
the ovarian and uterine excitement, and may represent an 
exaggeration of the mental irritability which is natural to 
women at that period. The patient becomes elated, hila- 
rious, talkative, passing soon from that condition into a state 
of acute and noisy mania, which may last for two or three 



RECURRENT INSANITY. 79 

weeks or longer,- and then sinking into a brief stage of more 
or less depression or confusion of mind, from which, she 
awakens to calmness and clearness of mind. In vain we 
flatter ourselves with the hope of a complete recovery ; after 
an interval of perfect lucidity, of varying duration in differ- 
ent cases, the attack recurs, goes through the same stages, 
and ends in the same way, only to be followed by other at- 
tacks, until at last, the mind being permanently weakened, 
there are no longer intervals of entire lucidity. Could we 
stop the attacks, the patient might still regain by degrees 
mental power ; but we cannot. All the resources of our art 
fail to touch them, and I know no other form of insanity 
which, having so much the air of being curable, thus far de- 
fies all efforts to stay its course. We should be apt to con- 
clude that it was connected with the menstrual function, 
were it not that periodicity is more or less the law of all ner- 
vous diseases, that its attacks often recur at uncertain inter- 
vals, and, more decisive still, that it is not confined to women, 
but occurs perhaps as often in men. Whether connected or 
not, however, in any way with the generative functions, it 
certainly presents features of relationship to epilepsy, and 
occurs where the insane neurosis exists; and, if I were to 
describe it in a few words, I should designate it an epilepsy 
of the mind. Its recurrence more or less regularly ; the 
uniformity of the prodromata and of the symptoms of the 
attack, each being almost an exact image of the other ; its 
comparatively brief duration ; the mental torpor or confu- 
sion which follows it, and the ignorance or denial sometimes, 
on the part of the patient, of his having had the attack ; the 
temporary recovery ; and the undoubted fact that it often 
occurs where there is evidence of an insane neurosis pro- 
duced by epilepsy, or insanity, or both, in the family; these 
are facts which support the opinion of its kinship to epilepsy. 
I have under my care an unmarried lady who for many years 
has been subject to these recurrent attacks of mania, and 
whose intelligence has now been destroyed by them ; ulti- 



80 BODY AND MIND. 

mately true epileptic fits supervened, but they only occur, at 
long intervals, usually not oftener than twice a year, while 
the maniacal attacks recur regularly every three or four 
weeks. It is of some interest, in regard to the question of 
its nature, that the age of its most frequent outbreak is, as it 
is with epilepsy, the years that cover the development of 
puberty. Irregularity or suppression of menstruation may 
or may not be present, so that we are not warranted in at- 
tributing the disease to amenorrhoea or dysmenorrhea ; we are 
the less warranted in doing so, as any form of insanity, how- 
ever caused, may occasion a suppression of the menses. 

The natural cessation of menstruation at the change of 
life is accompanied by a revolution in the economy which is 
often trying to the mental stability of those who have a pre- 
disposition to insanity. The age of pleasing is past, but not 
always the desire, which, indeed, sometimes grows then more 
exacting; there are all sorts of anomalous sensations of bod- 
ily distress, attesting the disturbance of circulation and of 
nerve functions; and it is now that an insane jealousy and a 
propensity to stimulants are apt to appear, especially where 
there have been no children. When positive insanity breaks 
out, it usually has the form of profound melancholia, with 
vague delusions of an extreme character, as that the world is 
in flames, that it is turned upside down, that every thing is 
changed, or that some very dreadful but undefined calamity 
has happened or is about to happen. The countenance has 
the expression of a vague terror and apprehension. In some 
cases short and transient paroxysms of excitement break the 
melancholy gloom. These usually occur at the menstrual 
periods, and may continue to do so for some time after the 
function has ceased. It is not an unfavorable form of in- 
sanity as regards probability of recovery under suitable treat- 
ment. 

Continuing the consideration of the influence of the gen- 
erative organs in the production of insanity, I come now to 
puerperal insanity. Under this name are sometimes con- 



PUERPERAL INSANITY. 81 

founded three distinct varieties of disease — that which occurs 
during pregnancy, that which follows parturition and is 
properly puerperal, and that which comes on months after- 
ward during lactation.* The insanity of pregnancy is, as a 
rule, of a marked melancholic type, with suicidal tendency ; 
a degree of mental weakness or apparent dementia being 
sometimes conjoined with it. Other cases, however, exhibit 
much moral perversion, perhaps an uncontrollable craving 
for stimulants, which we may regard as an exaggerated display 
of the fanciful cravings from which women suffer in the 
earlier months of pregnancy. We can hardly fail, indeed, to 
recognize a connection between the features of this form of 
insanity and the strange longings, the capriciousness, and the 
morbid fears, of the pregnant woman. The patient may be 
treated successfully by removal from home ; but, if the dis- 
ease be allowed to go on, there is no good ground to expect 
that parturition will have a beneficial effect upon it ; on the 
contrary, the probability is, that it will run into a severe puer- 
peral insanity, and from that into dementia. 

Puerperal insanity proper comes on within one month of 
parturition ; and, like the insanity of pregnancy, occurs most 
often in primiparse. The statistics of the Edinburgh Asylum 
show that in all the cases occurring before the sixteenth day 
after labor, as most cases do, the symptoms were those of 
acute mania ; but in all the cases which occurred after the 
sixteenth day they were those of melancholia. In both forms, 
but especially in the latter, there is sometimes a mixture of 
childishness and apparent dementia. The mania is more 
likely than the melancholia to get well. It is of an acute and 
extremely incoherent character, a delirious rather than a sys- 
tematized mania, marked by noisy restlessness, sleeplessness, 
tearing of clothes, hallucinations, and in some cases by great 
salacity, which is probably the direct mental effect of the irri- 
tation of the generative organs. Suicide may be attempted 

* " The Insanity of Pregnancy, Puerperal Insanity, and Insanity oi 
Lactation." By J. Batty Tuke, M. D. 



82 BODY AND MIND. 

in an excited, purposeless way. The bodily symptoms, con- 
tradicting the violence of the mental excitement, indicate 
feebleness ; the features are pinched ; the skin is pale, cold, 
and clammy ; and the pulse is quick, small, and irritable. 
"We may safely say that recovery takes place in three out of 
four cases of puerperal mania, usually in a few weeks; the 
patient, after the acute symptoms have subsided, sinking into 
a temporary state of confusion and feebleness of mind, and 
then waking up as from a dream. I may add the expression 
of a conviction that no good, hut rather harm, is done by 
attempting to stifle this or any other form of acute insanity 
by the administration of large doses of opium. 

The insanity of lactation .does not come under the scheme 
of this lecture ; for it is an asthenic insanity, produced by 
bodily exhaustion and the depression of mental worries. The 
time of its occurrence seems to show that the longer the 
child is suckled the greater is the liability to it ; and in the 
majority of cases it has the form of melancholia, often with 
determined suicidal tendency. 

So frequently is hereditary predisposition more or less 
distinctly traceable in these three forms of insanity occurring 
in connection with child-hearing, that we are warranted in 
declaring it quite exceptional for any one of them to be met 
with where it is entirely absent. 

I have now enumerated all the forms of insanity which, 
"being specially connected with the generative organs, pre- 
sent characteristic features. It is certain, however, that dis- 
ease of them may act as a powerful cooperating cause in the 
production of insanity, without giving rise, so far as we 
know, to a special group of symptoms. Thus, for example, 
melancholia, distinguishable by no feature from melancholia 
otherwise caused, may be the effect of disease of the uterus. 
Schroder van der Kolk mentions the case of a woman pro- 
foundly melancholic who suffered from prolapsus uteri, and 
in whom the melancholia disappeared when the uterus was 
returned to its proper place. Flemming relates two similar 



SYMPATHETIC INSANITY. 83 

cases in which melancholia was cured by the use of a pessary, 
the depression returning in one of them whenever the pessary 
was removed ; and I have met with one case in which pro- 
found melancholia of two years' standing disappeared after 
the removal of a prolapsus uteri. Other diseases and dis- 
placements of the uterus may act in a similar way. 

Let me now say a few words concerning the abdominal 
organs. No one will call in question that the states of their 
functions do exert a positive influence on our states of mind ; 
but it is unfortunately too true that we cannot yet refer any 
special mental symptoms to the influence of the abdominal 
organs. I have met with one case of severe melancholia, of 
long standing, which was distinctly cured by the expulsion 
of a tape-worm ; and it appears to be tolerably certain that 
hypochondriacal insanity is in some instances connected 
with, if not caused by, a perverted sensation proceeding from 
an internal organ, most often abdominal. In health we are 
not conscious of the impressions which these organs make 
upon the brain, albeit they assuredly send their unperceived 
contributions to the stream of energies of which conscious- 
ness is the sum and the outcome ; but, when a disordered or- 
gan sends a morbid impression to the brain, it no longer does 
its work there in silence and self-suppression, but asserts 
itself in an unwonted affection of consciousness. The hypo- 
chondriac cannot withdraw his attention from the morbid 
sensation to which it is irresistibly attracted, and which it 
aggravates; his interest in all things else is gradually 
quenched, and his ability to think and act freely in the rela- 
tions of life sapped. The step from this state to positive in- 
sanity is not a great one : the strange and distressing sensation, 
being so anomalous, so unlike any thing of which the patient 
has had experience, affecting him so powerfully and so unac- 
countably, gets at last an interpretation that seems suited to 
its extraordinary character ; and he then imagines that some 
animal or man or devil has got inside him and is tormenting 
him. He has now a hallucination of the organic sense which 



84 BODY AND MIND. 

dominates his thoughts, and he is truly insane. Not long since 
I saw a patient who believed that he had a man in his belly ; 
when his bowels were constipated, the delusion became active, 
he made desperate efforts by vomiting to get rid of his torment- 
or, and was then surly, morose, and dangerous; but, when 
his bowels had been relieved, the delusion subsided into the 
background, and he was good-tempered and industrious. If 
a patient, instead of attributing his sufferings to an absurdly 
impossible cause, ascribes them to a serious internal disease 
which he certainly has not got, there will be a difficulty in 
deciding whether he is insane or not, should he do injury to 
himself or others, as hypochondriacal melancholies sometimes 
do. It is a probable surmise that in those cases of insanity in 
which there are such delusions as that food will not enter 
the stomach, that there is no digestion, that the intestines 
are sealed up, there is a cause in a morbid irritation ascend- 
ing from the viscera to the brain. I am furthermore dis- 
posed to think that a form of fearful melancholia in which 
the patient evinces an extreme morbid sensitiveness to his 
every thought, feeling, and act, in which he is, as it were, 
hypochondriacally distressed about whatever he thinks, feels, 
and does, imagining it, however trivial and innocent, to be a 
great sin, which has cost him his happiness in time and eter- 
nity, has its foundation in certain morbid states of abdominal 
sensation. In cases of this sort, the delusion is not the cause 
of the feeling of despair, but is, as it were, a condensation 
from it, and an attempted interpretation of it. The same 
thing is observed in dreams : the images and events of a dis- 
tressing dream are not the causes of the feelings, but are 
caused by them; they undergo strange and sudden meta- 
morphoses without causing much or any surprise, and they 
disappear together with the terror the moment we awake, 
which would not be the case if they really caused the terror. 
"We perceive, indeed, in this generation of the image out of 
the feeling, the demonstration of the true nature of ghosts 
and apparitions ; the nervous system being in an excited 



PANPHOBIA. 85 

state of expectant fear, and the images being the effects and 
exponents of the feeling: they give the vague terror form. 
Accordingly, as Coleridge has remarked, those who see a 
ghost under such circumstances do not suffer much in conse- 
quence, though in telling the story they will perhaps say that 
their hair stood on end, and that they were in an agony of terror ; 
whereas those who have been really frightened by a figure 
dressed up as a ghost have often suffered seriously from the 
shock, having fainted, or had a fit, or gone mad. In like man- 
ner, if an insane person actually saw the dreadful things which 
he imagines that he sees sometimes, and really thought the ter- 
rible thoughts which he imagines he thinks, he would suffer in 
health more than he does, if he did not actually die of them. 
I come now to the thoracic organs. The heart and 
the lungs are closely connected in their functions, so that 
they mutually affect one another. Some diseases of the 
lungs greatly oppress and trouble the heart ; yet there is 
reason to believe that they have their special effects upon 
the mind. How, indeed, can we think otherwise when we 
contrast the sanguine confidence of the consumptive patient 
with the anxious fear and apprehension exhibited in some 
diseases of the heart ? It used to be said that disease of the 
heart was more frequent among the insane than among the 
sane ; but the latest observations do not afford any support 
to the opinion, nor do they furnish valid grounds to connect 
a particular variety of insanity with heart-disease in those 
cases in which it does exist. All that we are thus far war- 
ranted in affirming is, that if there be a characteristic mental 
effect of such disease, it is a great fear, mounting up at times 
to despairing anguish ; and perhaps I may venture to add 
that, if there be a variety of mental disorder specifically con- 
nected with heart-disease, it is that form of melancholia in 
which the patient is overwhelmed with a vague and vast 
apprehension, where there is not so much a definite delusion 
as a dreadfuLfear of every thing actual and possible, and 
which is sometimes described as panphobia. 



86 BODY AND MIND. 

There has long been an opinion, which seems to be well 
founded, that tubercle of the lungs is more common among 
the insane than among the sane. Tor although the propor- 
tion of deaths in asylums attributed to phthisis is one-fourth, 
which is the same proportion as that for the sane population 
above fourteen years of age, Dr. Olouston has shown, by 
careful scrutiny of the records of 282 post-mortem examina- 
tions made in the Edinburgh Asylum, that phthisis was the 
assigned cause of death in only a little more than half of the 
cases in which there was tubercle in the body. The symp- 
toms of phthisis are so much masked in the insane, there 
being usually no cough and no expectoration, that its diag- 
nosis is difficult, and it is not always detected during life. 
The relation between it and insanity has been noticed by 
several writers : Schroder van der Kolk was distinctly of 
opinion that an hereditary predisposition to phthisis might 
predispose to, or develop into, insanity, and, on the other 
hand, that insanity predisposed to phthisis ; and Dr. Clous- 
ton found that hereditary prediposition to insanity existed in 
seven per cent, more of the insane who were tubercular than 
of the insane generally. When family degeneration is far 
gone, the two diseases appear to occur frequently, and the 
last member is likely to die insane or phthisical, or both ; 
whether, therefore, they mutually predispose to one another 
or not, they are often concomitant effects in the course of 
degeneration. However, in weighing the specific value of 
these observations, we must not forget that, independently 
of any special relation, the enfeebled nutrition of tuberculosis 
will tend to stimulate into activity the latent predisposition 
to insanity ; and that, in like manner, insanity, especially in 
its melancholic forms, will favor the actual development of a 
predisposition to phthisis. 

In the cases in which the development of phthisis and 
insanity has been nearly contemporaneous, which are about 
one-fourth of the cases in which they coexist, the mental 
symptoms are of so peculiar and uniform a character as to 



PHTHISICAL MANIA. 87 

have led to the inclusion of the cases in a natural group 
under the designation of phthisical mania. They have no 
positively distinctive symptom, it is true ; they cannot be 
separated from other cases by a well-defined line of demar- 
cation. Yet they do exhibit, Dr. Clouston believes, certain 
common and uniform characters which justify their descrip- 
tion as a separate variety. They often begin in an insidious 
way by irritability, waywardness, and capriciousness of con- 
duct, and apparent weakening of intellect ; yet the patient 
converses rationally when he chooses to talk, and shows that 
he still has his intellect, albeit there is a great disinclination 
to exert it. To sign a certificate of his insanity would be no 
easy matter. Or they begin with an acutely maniacal or 
melancholic stage, which is, however, of very short duration, 
soon passing into a half-maniacal, half-demented state. If 
there be a single characteristic feature, it is a monomania of 
suspicion. As the disease advances, the symptoms of de- 
mentia predominate ; but there are occasional brief attacks 
of irritable excitement and fitful flashes of intelligence. And 
in these cases, more often than in other cases, there occurs a 
momentary revival of intelligence before death. We shall 
the more readily admit the special features of phthisical 
mania when we call to mind that there is in most phthisical 
patients a peculiar mental state ; and that brief attacks of 
temporary mania or delirium sometimes occur in the course 
of phthisis. The phthisical patient is irritable, fanciful, un- 
stable of purpose, brilliant, and imaginative, but wanting in 
calmness and repose, quick of insight, but without depth and 
comprehension ; every thing is fitful — fitful energy, fitful pro- 
jects, fitful flashes of imagination. The hectic is in his ] 
thoughts and in his actions. The whims and imaginings of 
his mind become almost wanderings at times, his fancies 
almost delusions. 

I have now said enough concerning the sympathetic 
mental effects of disordered organs, not certainly to set forth 
adequately their nature, but to show the essential importance 



88 BODY AND MIND. 

of a careful study of them. To complete the exposition of 
the action of pathological sympathies on mind, it would be 
necessary to trace out the close relations that there are 
between the organic feelings and the different kinds of special 
sensibility — between systemic and sense consciousness. The 
digestive organs have a close sympathy with the sense of 
taste, as we observe in the bad taste accompanying indiges- 
tion, in the nausea and vomiting which a nauseous taste 
may cause, and in the avoidance of poisonous matter by 
animals. The respiratory organs and the sense of smell are, 
in like manner, sympathetically associated ; and there can be 
no doubt that the sense of smell has special relations with the 
sexual feeling. The state of the digestive organs notably 
affects the general sensibility of the skin. Disturbances of 
these physiological sympathies may become the occasions of 
insane delusions. Digestive derangement, perverting the 
taste, will engender a delusion that the food is poisoned. 
Disease of the respiratory organs appears sometimes to pro- 
duce disagreeable smells, which are then perhaps attributed 
to objective causes, such as the presence of a corpse in the 
room, or to gases maliciously disseminated in it by fancied 
persecutors. In mania, smell and taste are often grossly per- 
verted, for the patient will devour, with seeming relish and 
avidity, dirt and garbage of the most offensive kind. Increase, 
diminution, or perversion of the sensibility of the skin, one 
or other of which is not uncommon among the insane, may 
undoubtedly be the cause of extravagant delusions. "We 
hardly, indeed, realize how completely the mind is dependent 
upon the habit of its sensations. The man who has lost a 
limb can hardly be persuaded that he has lost it, so sensible 
is he of the accustomed feelings in it ; years after he has lost 
it he dreams of vivid sensations and of active movements in 
it — has, in fact, both sensory and motor hallucinations. It is 
easy, then, to understand how greatly abnormal sensations 
may perplex and deceive the unsound mind. A woman under 
Esquirol's care had complete anaesthesia of the skin: she 



HALLUCINATIONS. 89 

believed that the devil had carried off her body. A soldier 
*vho was wounded at the battle of Austerlitz lost the sensibil- 
ity of his skin, and from that time thought himself dead. 
When asked how he was, he replied, u Lambert no longer 
lives ; a cannon-ball carried him away at Austerlitz. What 
you see is not Lambert, but a badly-imitated machine," which 
he always spoke of as it. A patient under my care, who suf- 
fered from general paralysis, and had lost sensibility and 
voluntary power of one side, could never be persuaded that 
another patient, a very harmless fellow, had not got hold of 
him, and was keeping him down ; and when convulsions 
occurred in the paralyzed side, as they did from time to time, 
he swore terribly at his fancied tormentor. Were a sane per- 
son to wake up some morning with the cutaneous sensibility 
gone, or with a large area of it sending up to the brain per- 
verted and quite unaccountable impressions, it might be a 
hard matter perhaps for him to help going mad. 

The mental effects of perverted sensation afford a promis- 
ing field for future research ; when better understood it can- 
not be doubted that they will explain many phenomena in 
the pathology of mind that now quite baffle explanation. It 
behooves us to clearly realize the broad fact, which has most 
wide-reaching consequences in mental physiology and pathol- 
ogy, that all parts of the body, the highest and the lowest, 
have a sympathy with one another more intelligent than 
conscious intelligence can yet, or perhaps ever will, conceive ; 
that there is not an organic motion, visible or invisible, sen- 
sible or insensible, ministrant to the noblest or to the most 
humble purposes, which does not work its appointed effect in 
the complex recesses of mind ; that the mind, as the crowning 
achievement of organization, and the consummation and out- 
come of all its energies, really comprehends the bodily life. 

I had originally set down within the purpose of these 
Lectures the consideration, which I must now forego, of the 
influence of the quantity and quality of the blood in the pro- 
duction of insanity. Poverty and vitiation of blood may 



90 BODY AND MIND. 

certainly play a weighty part in producing mental, as they do 
in producing other nervous disorders. Lower the supply of 
blood to the brain below a certain level, and the power of 
thinking is abolished ; the brain will then no more do mental 
work than a water-wheel will move the machinery of the mill 
when the water is lowered so as not to touch it. When a 
strong emotion produces a temporary loss of consciousness, 
it is to be presumed that a contraction of arteries takes place 
within the brain similar to that which causes the pallor of 
jche face ; and when the laboring heart pumps hard to over- 
come the obstruction, and the walls of the vessels are weak, 
(they may burst, and the patient die of effusion of blood, 
j During sleep the supply of blood to the brain is lessened 
(naturally, and we perceive the effects of the lowering of the 
supply, as it takes place, in the sort of incoherence or mild 
delirium of ideas just before falling off to sleep. To alike 
condition of things we ought most probably to attribute the 
attacks of transitory mania or delirium that occur now and 
then in consequence of great physical exhaustion, as from 
great and sudden loss of blood, or just as convalescence from 
fever or other acute disease is setting in, or in the prostration 
of phthisis, and which a glass of wine opportunely given will 
sometimes cure. The distress^of the melancholic patient is 
greatest when he wakes in the morning, which is a time 
when a watch ought to be kept specially over the suicidal 
patient; the reason lying probably in the effects of the di- 
minished cerebral circulation during sleep. 

If the state of the blood be vitiated by reason of some 
poison bred in the body, or introduced into it from without, 
the mental functions may be seriously deranged. We are 
able, indeed, by means of the drugs at our command, to per- 
form all sorts of experiments on the mind : we can suspend 
its action for a time by chloral or chloroform, can exalt its 
functions by small doses of opium or moderate doses of alco- 
hol, can pervert them, producing an artificial delirium, by the 
administration of large enough doses of belladonna and Indian 



VITIATED BLOOD. 91 

hemp. We can positively do more experimentally with the 
functions of the mind-centres than we can do with those of 
any other organ of the body. When these are exalted in con- 
sequence of a foreign substance introduced into the blood, it 
cannot be doubted that some physical effect is produced on 
the nerve-element, which is the condition of the increased 
activity, not otherwise probably than as happens when a 
fever makes, as it certainly will sometimes do, a demented 
person, whose mind seemed gone past all hope of even mo- 
mentary recovery, quite sensible for the time being. Perhaps 
this should teach us that, just as there are vibrations of light 
which we cannot see, and vibrations of sound which we can- 
not hear, so there are molecular movements in the brain which 
are incapable of producing thought ordinarily, not sufficing to 
affect consciousness, but which may do so when the sensi- 
bility of the molecules is exalted by physical or chemical 
modification of them. 

Alcohol yields us, in its direct effects, the abstract and 
brief chronicle of the course of mania. At first there is an 
agreeable excitement, a lively flow of ideas, a revival of old 
ideas and feelings which seemed to have passed from the mind, 
a general increase of mental activity — a condition very like 
that which often precedes an attack of acute mania, when 
the patient is witty, lively, satirical, makes jokes or rhymes, 
and certainly exhibits a brilliancy of fancy which he is capable 
of at no other time. Then there follows, in the next stage of 
its increasing action, as there does in mania, the automatic 
excitation of ideas which start up and follow one another 
without order, so that thought and speech are more or less 
incoherent, while passion is easily excited. After this stage 
has lasted for a time, in some longer, in others shorter, it 
passes into one of depression and maudlin melancholy, just as 
mania sometimes passes into melancholia, or convulsion into 
paralysis. And the last stage of all is one of stupor and de- 
mentia. If the abuse of alcohol be continued for years, it 
may cause different forms of mental derangement, in each of 



92 BODY AND MIND. 

which the muscular are curiously like the mental symptoms : 
delirium tremens in one, an acute noisy and destructive mania 
in another, chronic alcoholism in a third, and a condition of 
mental weakness with loss of memory and loss of energy in a 
fourth. 

"Writers on gout agree that a suppressed gout may entail 
mental derangement in some persons ; and, on the other hand, 
that insanity has sometimes disappeared with the appearance 
of the usual gouty paroxysm. Sydenham noticed and described 
a species of mania supervening on an epidemic of intermittent 
fever, which, he remarks, contrary to all other kinds of mad- 
ness, would not yield to plentiful venesection and purging. 
Griesinger, again, has directed attention to cases in which, 
instead of the usual symptoms of ague, the patient has had an 
intermittent insanity in regular tertian or quartan attacks, and 
has been cured by quinine. We must bear in mind, however, 
that intermittence may be a feature of insanity as of other 
nervous diseases, without ague having any thing whatever to 
do with it, and without quinine doing any good whatever. 
Quinine will not cure the intermittence of nervous diseases, 
though it may cure ague in which the symptoms are inter- 
mittent. Griesinger has also pointed out that mental disorder 
has sometimes occurred in the course of acute rheumatism, 
the swelling of the joints meanwhile subsiding. These facts, 
with others which I cannot dwell upon now, prove how im- 
portant an agency in the production of insanity a perverted 
state of the blood may be. But it is a mode of causation of 
which we know so little that I may justly declare we know 
next to nothing. The observation and classification of mental 
disorders have been so exclusively psychological that we have 
not sincerely realized the fact that they illustrate the same 
pathological principles as other diseases, are produced in the 
same way, and must be investigated in the same spirit of posi- 
tive research. Until this be done I see no hope of improve- 
ment in our knowledge of them, and no use in multiplying 
books about them. 



IDIOPATHIC INSANITY. 93 

It is quite true that when we have referred all the cases 
of insanity which we can to bodily causes, and grouped them 
according to their characteristic bodily and mental features, 
there will remain cases which we cannot refer to any recog- 
nizable bodily cause or connect with any definite bodily dis- 
ease, and which we must be content to describe as idiopathic. 
The explanation of these cases we shall probably discover 
ultimately in the influence of the hereditary neurosis and in 
the peculiarities of individual temperament. It is evident 
that there are fundamental differences of temperament, and 
it is furthermore plain that different natures will be differently 
favored in the struggle of existence ; one person will have an 
advantage over another, and by the operation of the law of 
Natural Selection there will be a success of the fittest to suc- 
ceed. It is with the development of mind in the conduct of life 
as it is with every form of life in its relation to its environ- 
ment. Life is surrounded by forces that are always tending 
to destroy it, and with which it may be represented as in a 
continued warfare : so long as it contends successfully with 
them, winning from them and constraining them to further 
its development, it flourishes ; but when it can no longer strive, 
when they succeed in winning from it and increasing at its 
expense, it begins to decay and die. So it is with mind in 
the circumstances of its existence : the individual who cannot 
use circumstances, or accommodate himself successfully to 
them, and in the one way or the other make them further his 
development, is controlled and used by them ; being weak, he 
must be miserable, must be a victim ; and one way in wirich 
his suffering and failure will be manifest will be in insanity. 
Thus it is that mental trials which serve in the end to strength- 
en a strong nature break down a weak one which cannot fitly 
react, and that the efficiency of a moral cause of insanity 
betrays a conspiracy from within with the unfavorable out- 
ward circumstances. 

It behooves us to bear distinctly in mind, when we take 
the moral causes of insanity into consideration, that the men- 



94 BODY AND MIND. 

tal suffering or psychical pain of a sad emotion testifies 
to actual wear and tear of nerve-element, to disintegration 
of some kind ; it is the exponent of a physical change. 
What the change is we know not; but we may take it to be 
beyond question that, when a shock imparted to the mind 
through the senses causes a violent emotion, it produces a 
real commotion in the molecules of the brain. It is not that 
an intangible something flashes inward and mysteriously af- 
fects an intangible metaphysical entity ; but that an impres- 
sion made on the sense is conveyed along nervous paths of 
communication, and produces a definite physical effect in 
physically-constituted mind- centres ; and that the mental 
effect, which is the exponent of the physical change, may be 
then transferred by molecular motion to the muscles, thus 
getting muscular expression, or to the processes of nutrition 
and secretion, getting expression in modifications of them. 
When there is a native infirmity or instability of nerve- 
element, in consequence of bad ancestral influences, the in- 
dividual will be more liable to, and will suffer more from, 
such violent mental commotions; the disintegrating change 
in the nerve-element will be more likely to pass into a disor- 
ganization which rest and nutrition cannot repair, not other- 
wise than as happens with the elements of any other organ 
under like conditions of excessive stimulation. As pbysi- 
cians, we cannot afford to lose sight of the physical aspects 
of mental states, if we would truly comprehend the nature 
of mental disease, and learn to treat it with success. The 
metaphysician may, for the purposes of speculation, separate 
mind from body, and evoke the laws of its operation out of 
the depths of self- consciousness; but the physician — who 
has to deal practically with the thoughts, feelings, and con- 
duct of men ; who has to do with mind, not as an abstract 
entity concerning which he may be content to speculate, but 
as a force in Nature, the operations of which he must pa- 
tiently observe and anxiously labor to influence — must recog- 
nize how entirely the integrity of the mental functions de- 



UNITY OF BODY AND MIND. 95 

pends on the integrity of the bodily organization — must ac- 
knowledge the essential unity of body and mind. 

To set forth this unity has been a chief aim in these Lec- 
tures, because I entertain a most sincere conviction that a 
just conception of it must lie at the foundation of a real ad- 
vance in our knowledge both of the physiology and pathol- 
ogy of mind. I have no wish whatever to exalt unduly the 
body ; I have, if possible, still less desire to degrade the mind ; 
but I do protest, with all' the energy I dare use, against the 
unjust and most unscientific practice of declaring the body 
vile and despicable, of looking down upon the highest and 
most wonderful contrivance of creative skill as something of 
which man dare venture to feel ashamed. I cannot now 
summarize the facts and arguments which I have brought 
forward ; I must trust to the indulgence of your memory of 
them when I declare that to my mind it appears a clear sci- 
entific duty to repudiate the quotation from an old writer, 
which the late Sir "William Hamilton used to hang on the 
wall of his lecture-room : 

" On earth there is nothing great but man, 
In man there is nothing great but mind." 

The aphorism, which, like most aphorisms, contains an equal 
measure of truth and untruth, is suitable enough to the pure 
metaphysician, but it is most unsuitable to the scientific in- 
quirer, who is bound to reject it, not because of that which 
is not true in it only, but much more because of the baneful 
spirit with which it is inspired. On earth there are assured- 
ly other things great besides man, though none greater ; and 
in man there are other things great besides mind, though none 
greater. And whosoever, inspired by the spirit of the aph- 
orism, thinks to know any thing truly of man without study- 
ing most earnestly the things on earth that lead up to man, 
or to know any thing truly of mind without studying most 
earnestly the things in. the body that lead up to and issue in 
mind, will enter on a barren labor, which, if not a sorrow to 



96 BODY AND MIND. 

himself, will assuredly be sorrow and vexation of spirit to 
others. To reckon the highest operations of mind to be 
functions of a mental organization is to exalt, not to degrade, 
our conception of creative power and skill. For, if it be 
lawful and right to burst into admiration of the wonderful 
contrivance in Nature by which noble and beautiful products 
are formed out of base materials, it is surely much stronger 
evidence of contrivance to have developed the higher mental 
functions by evolution from the lower, and to have used 
forms of matter as the organic instruments of all. I know 
not why the Power which created matter and its properties 
should be thought not to have endowed it with the functions 
of reason, feeling, and will, seeing that, whether we discover 
it to be so endowed or not, the mystery is equally incompre- 
hensible to us, equally simple and easy to the Power which 
created matter and its properties. To a right-thinking and 
right-feeling mind, the beauty, the grandeur, the mystery of 
Nature are augmented, not lessened, by each new glimpse into 
the secret recesses of her operations. The sun going forth 
from its chamber in the east to run its course is not less glo- 
rious in majesty because we have discovered the law of gravi- 
tation, and are able by spectral analysis to detect the metals 
which enter into its composition — because it is no longer 
Helios driving his golden chariot though the pathless spaces 
of the heavens. The mountains are not less imposing in 
their grandeur because the Oreads have deserted them, nor 
the groves less attractive, nor the streams more desolate, be- 
cause science has banished the Dryads and the Naiads. No, 
science has not destroyed poetry, nor expelled the divine 
from Nature, but has furnished the materials, and given the 
presages, of a higher poetry and a mightier philosophy than 
the world has yet seen. The grave of each superstition 
which it slays is the womb of a better birth. And if it 
come to pass in its onward march — as it may well be it will 
come to pass — that other superstitions shall be dethroned as 



SCIENCE AND POETRY. 97 

the sun-god has been dethroned, we may rest assured that 
this also will be a step in human progress, and in the benefi- 
cent evolution of the Power which ruleth alike the courses 
of the stars and the ways of men. 



APPENDIX 



I.— THE LIMITS OF PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY.* 

It is not a little hard upon those who now devote them- 
selves to the patient interrogation of Nature, by means of 
observation and experiment, that they should be counted, 
whether they will or not, ministers of the so-called Positive 
Philosophy, and disciples of him who is popularly considered 
the founder of that philosophy. No matter that positive in- 
vestigation within the limits which Comte prescribes was 
pursued earnestly and systematically before his advent, and 
with an exactness of method of which he had no conception; 
that many of those distinguished since his time for their 
scientific, researches and generalizations have been unac- 
quainted with his writings; that others who have studied 
them withhold their adherence from his doctrines, or ener- 
getically disclaim them. These things are not considered; 
so soon as a scientific inquirelNpushes his researches into the 
phenomena of life and mind, ne is held to be a Comtist. Thus 
it happens that there is a growing tendency in the public 
mind to identify modern science with the Positive Philosophy. 
Considering how much mischief has often been done by iden- 

* Journal of Mental Science, No. 70. The Limits of Philosophical Inquiry. 
Address delivered to the Members of the Edinburgh Philosophical Institu- 
tion, November 6, 1888. By William, Lord-Archbishop of York. (Edmon- 
ston and Douglas.) 



THE LIMITS OF PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY. 



99 



tifying the character of an epoch of thought with the doc- 
trines of some eminent man who has lived and labored and 
taken the lead in it, and thus making his defects and errors, 
hardened into formulas, chains to fetter the free course of 
thought, it is no wonder that scientific men should be anxious 
to disclaim Comte as their lawgiver, and to protest against 
such a king being set up to reign over them. Not conscious 
of any personal obligation to his writings, conscious how 
much, in some respects, he has misrepresented the spirit and 
pretensions of science, they repudiate the allegiance which 
his enthusiastic disciples would force upon them, and which 
popular opinion is fast coming to think a natural one. Ahey 
do well in thus making a timely assertion m indepen&n%e ; 
for, if it be not done soon, it will soon be t<K> late to be do%e 
well. "When we look back at tl^e histor^ of system! of re- 
ligion and philosophy, it is almost appalling to reflect ho 
entirely one man has appropriated the intellectual develo]f|p 
ment of his age, and how despotically he has constrained t 
faith of generations after him ; the mind of mankind is abso- 
lutely oppressed by the weight of his authority, and his errors 
and limitations are deemed not less sacred than the true ideas 
of which he has been the organ: for a time he is made an 
idol, at the sound of whose name the human intellect is ex- 
pected to fall down and worship, as\ the people, nations, and 
languages were expected, at what time they heard the sound 
of the flute, harp, sackfmt, dulcmieii an^i all kinds of music, 
to fall down and worship the golaea image which Nebuchad- 
nezzar the king had set up. Happily it is not so easy to take 
captive the understanding now, |f hen thought is busy on so 
many subjects in such various domains of Natmre, and when 
an army of investigators "often marches wher% formerly a 
solitary pioneer painfully sought his way, as it yas when the 
fields of intellectual activity "were few and limited, and the 
laborers in them few also. Nk ^^ 

A lecture delivered by the Archbishop of York before the 
Edinburgh Philosophical Institution, which has been pub- 




100 THE LIMITS OF 

lished as a pamphlet, contains a plain, earnest, and on the 
whole temperate, bnt not very closely-reasoned, criticism, 
from his point of view, of the tendency of modern scientific 
research, or rather of Positivism, and a somewhat vague dec- 
laration of the limits of philosophical inquiry. He perceives 
with sorrow, but not with great apprehension, that the pros- 
pects of philosophy are clouded over in England, France, and 
Germany, and that a great part of the thinking world is oc- 
cupied with physical researches. But he does not therefore 
despair ; believing that Positivism indicates only a temporary 
mood, produced by prostration and lassitude after a period 
of unusual controversy, and that it will after a time pass 
away, and be followed by a new era of speculative activity. 
It may be presumed that men, weary of their fruitless efforts 
to scale the lofty and seemingly barren heights of true philos- 
ophy, have taken the easy path of Positivism, which does not 
lead upward at all, but leads, if it be followed far enough, to 
quagmires of unbelief. The facts on which the archbishop 
bases his opinion, and the steps of reasoning by which he is 
able thus to couple a period of speculative activity with a 
period of religious belief, and to declare a system of positive 
scientific research to be linked inseparably with a system of 
unbelief, do not appear ; they are sufficient to inspire strong 
conviction in him, but they apparently lie too far down in 
the depths of his moral consciousness to be capable of being 
unfolded, in lucid sequence, to the apprehension of others. 

To the critical reader of the lecture it must at once occur 
that a want of discrimination between things that are wide- 
ly different is the cause of no little looseness, if not reck- 
lessness, of assertion. In the first place, the archbishop 
identifies off-hand the course and aim of modern scientific 
progress with the Positivism of Comte and his followers. 
This is very much as if any one should insist on attributing 
the same character and the same aim to persons who were 
travelling for a considerable distance along the same road. 
As it was Oomte's great aim to organize a harmonious co- 



PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY. 101 

ordination and subordination of the sciences, he assimilated 
and used for his purpose the scientific knowledge which was 
available to him, &nd systematized the observed method of 
scientific progress from the more simple and general to the 
more special and complex studies ; but it assuredly is most 
unwarrantable to declare those who are engaged in physical 
research to be committed to his conclusions and pretensions, 
and there can be no question that a philosophy of science, 
when it is written, will differ widely from the so-called Posi- 
tive Philosophy. 

In the second place, the archbishop unwittingly perpe- 
trates a second and similarly reckless injustice in assuming, 
as he does, that modern science must needs accept what he 
describes as the sensational philosophy. " Thus the business 
of science," he says, "is to gather up the facts as they ap- 
pear, without addition or perversion of the senses. As the 
senses are our only means of knowledge, and we can only 
know things as they present themselves to the eye and ear, 
it follows that our knowledge is not absolute knowledge of 
the things, but a knowledge of their relations to us, that is, 
of our sensations." Passing by the question, which might 
well be raised, whether any one, even the founder of the 
sensational philosophy, ever thus crudely asserted the senses 
to be our only means of knowledge, and our knowledge to 
be only a knowledge of our sensations ; passing by, too, any 
discussion concerning what the archbishop means, if he 
means any thing, by an absolute knowledge of things as dis- 
tinct from a knowledge of things in their relations to us, and 
all speculations concerning the faculties which finite and rel- 
ative beings who are not archbishops have of apprehending 
and comprehending the absolute ; it is necessary to protest 
against the assumption that science is committed to such a 
representation of the sensational philosophy, or to the sensa- 
tional philosophy at all. Those modern inquirers who have 
pushed farthest their physical researches into mental func- 
tions and bodily organs have notoriously been at great pains 



102 THE LIMITS OF 

to discriminate between the nervous centres which minister 
to sensation and those which minister to reflection, and have 
done much to elucidate the physical and functional connec- 
tions between them. They have never been guilty of calling 
all knowledge a knowledge only of sensations, for they rec- 
ognize how vague, barren, and unmeaning, are the terms of 
the old language of philosophical strife, when an attempt is 
made to apply them with precision to the phenomena re- 
vealed by exact scientific observation. The sensorial centres 
with which the senses are in direct connection are quite dis- 
tinct from, and subordinate to, the nervous centres of idea- 
tion or reflection — the supreme hemispherical ganglia. It is 
in these, which are far more developed in man than in any 
other animal, and more developed in the higher than in the 
lower races of men, that sensation is transformed into knowl- 
edge, and that reflective consciousness has its seat. The 
knowledge so acquired is not drained from the outer world 
through the senses, nor is it a physical mixture or a chemical 
compound of so much received from without and so much 
added by the mind or brain ; it is an organized result of a 
most complex and delicate process of development in the 
highest kind of organic element in Nature— a mental organi- 
zation accomplished, like any other organization, in accord- 
ance with definite laws. "We have to do with laws of life, 
and the language used in the interpretation of phenomena 
must accord with ideas derived from the study of organiza- 
tion ; for assuredly it cannot fail to produce confusion if it be 
the expression only of ideas derived from the laws of phys- 
ical phenomena, so far as these are at present known to us. 
Now, the organization of a definite sensation is a very differ- 
ent matter from, has no resemblance in Nature to, the phys- 
ical impression made upon the organ of sense, and the or- 
ganization of an idea is a higher and more complex vital 
process than the organization of a sensation ; to call knowl- 
edge, therefore, a knowledge only of sensation is either a 
meaningless proposition, or, in so far as it has meaning, it is 



PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY. 103 

falser than it would be to affirm the properties of a chemical 
compound to be those of its constituents. Were they who 
pursue the scientific study of mind not more thoughtful than 
the Archbishop of York gives them credit for being, they 
would have no reason to give why animals with as many 
senses as man has, and with some of them more acute than 
his, have not long since attained, like him, to an understand- 
ing of the benefits of establishing archbishoprics. 

It must be understood that by the assertion of the organic 
basis of mental function is not meant that the mind imposes 
the laws of its own organization; on the contrary, it obeys 
them, knowing not whence they come nor whither they 
tend. Innate ideas, fundamental ideas, categories of the un- 
derstanding, and like metaphysical expressions, are obscure 
intimations of the laws of action of the internal organizing 
power under the conditions of its existence and exercise ; 
and it is easy to perceive that a new and higher sense con- 
ferred on man, altering entirely these conditions, would at 
once render necessary a new order of fundamental ideas or 
categories of the understanding. That all our knowledge is 
relative cannot be denied, unless it be maintained that in that 
wonderful organizing power which cometh from afar there 
lies hidden that which may be intuitively revealed to con- 
sciousness as absolute knowledge — that the nature of the 
mysterious power which inspires and impels evolution may, 
by a flash of intuitive consciousness, be made manifest to 
the mind in the process of its own development. If Nature 
be attaining to a complete self-consciousness in man, far 
away from such an end as it seems to be, it is conceivable 
that this might happen ; and if such a miraculous inspiration 
were thus to reveal the unknown, it would be a revelation of 
the one primeval Power. Clearly, however, as positive sci- 
entific research is powerless before a vast mystery — the 
whence, what, and whither, of the mighty power which 
gives the impulse to evolution — it is not justified in making 
any proposition regarding it. This, however, it may rightly 



104 THE LIMITS OF 

do ; while keeping its inquiries within the limits of the 
knowable, it may examine critically, and use all available 
means of testing, the claims and credentials of any professed 
revelation of the mystery. And it is in the pursuit of such 
inquiries that it would have been satisfactory to have had 
from the archbishop, as a high-priest of the mystery, some 
gleam of information as to the proper limits which he be- 
lieves ought to be observed. At what point is the hitherto 
and no farther to which inquiry may advance in that direc- 
tion ? "Where do we reach the holy ground when it becomes 
necessary to put the scientific shoes from off our feet ? There 
must assuredly be some right and duty of examination into 
the evidence of revelations claiming to be Divine ; for, if it 
were not so, how could the intelligent Mussulman ever be, 
if he ever is, persuaded to abandon the one God of his faith, 
and to accept what must seem to him the polytheism of the 
Christian Trinity ? 

Another error, or rather set of errors, into which the 
archbishop plunges, is that he assumes positive science to be 
materialistic, and materialism to involve the negation of God, 
of immortality, and of free will. This imputation of mate- 
rialism, which ought never to have been so lightly made, it is 
quite certain that the majority of scientific men would ear- 
nestly disclaim. Moreover, the materialist, as such, is not 
under any logical constraint whatever to deny either the ex- 
istence of a God, or the immortality of the soul, or free will. 
One is almost tempted to say that in two things the arch- 
bishop distances competition : first, in the facility with which 
he loses or dispenses with the links of his own chain of rea- 
soning; and, secondly, in his evident inability to perceive, 
when looking sincerely with all his might, real and essential 
distinctions which are at all subtile, which are not broadly, 
and almost coarsely, marked. If the edge of a distinction be 
fine, if it be not as blunt as a weaver's beam, it fails seem- 
ingly to attract his attention. Whosoever believes sincerely 
in the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, as taught by 



PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY. 105 

the Apostle Paul, which all Christians profess to do, must 
surely have some difficulty in conceiving the immortality of 
the soul apart from that of the body; for, if the apostle's 
preaching and the Christian's faith be not vain, and the body 
do rise again, then it may be presumed that the soul and it 
will share a common immortality, as they have shared a com- 
mon mortality. So far, then, from materialism being the ne- 
gation of immortality, the greatest of the apostles, the great 
Apostle of the Gentiles, earnestly preached materialism as es- 
sential to the life which is to come. There is as little or less 
justification for saying that materialism involves of necessity 
the denial of free will. The facts on which the doctrine of 
free will is based are the same facts of observation, whether 
spiritualism or materialism be the accepted faith, and the 
question of their interpretation is not essentially connected 
with the one or the other faith ; the spiritualist may consist- 
ently deny, and the materialist consistently advocate, free 
will. In like manner, the belief in the existence of God is 
nowise inconsistent with the most extreme materialism, for 
the belief is quite independent of the facts and reasons on 
which that faith is founded. The spiritualist may deny God 
the power to make matter think, but the materialist need not 
deny the existence of God because he holds that matter may 
be capable of thought. Multitudes may logically believe that 
mind is inseparable from body in life or death — that it is 
born with it, grows, ripens, decays, and dies with it, without 
disbelieving in a great and intelligent Power who has called 
man into being, and ordained the greater light to rule the day 
and the lesser light to rule the night. 

What an unnecessary horror hangs over the word materi- 
alism ! It has an ugly sound and an indefinite meaning, and 
is well suited, therefore, to be set up as a sort of moral 
scarecrow ; but, if it be closely examined, it will be found to 
have the semblance of something terrible, and to be empty 
of any real harm. In the assertion that mind is altogether a 
function of matter, there is no more actual irreverence than in 



106 THE LIMITS OF 

asserting that matter is the realization of mind ; the one and 
the other proposition being equally meaningless so far as they 
postulate a knowledge of any thing more than phenomena. 
Whether extension be visible thought, or thought invisible ex- 
tension, is a question of a choice of words, and not of a choice 
of conceptions. To those who cannot conceive that any or- 
ganization of matter, however complex, should be capable of 
such exalted functions as those which are called mental, is it 
really more conceivable that any organization of matter can 
be the mechanical instrument of the complex manifestations 
of an immaterial mind ? Is it not as easy for an omnipotent 
power to endow matter with mental functions as it is to 
create an immaterial entity capable of accomplishing them 
through matter ? Is the Creator's arm shortened, so that He 
cannot endow matter with sensation and ideation? It is 
strangely overlooked by many who write on this matter, that 
the brain is not a dead instrument, but a living organ, with 
functions of a higher kind than those of any other bodily 
organ, insomuch as its organic nature and structure far sur- 
pass those of any other organ. What, then, are those func- 
tions if they are not mental ? ISTo one thinks it necessary to 
assume an immaterial liver behind the hepatic structure, in or- 
der to account for its functions. But so far as the nature of 
nerve and the complex structure of the cerebral convolutions 
exceed in dignity the hepatic elements and structure, so far 
must the material functions of the brain exceed those of the 
liver. Men are not sufficiently careful to ponder the wonder- 
ful operations of which matter is capable, or to reflect on the 
miracles effected by it which are continually before their eyes. 
Are the properties of a chemical compound less mysterious 
essentially because of the familiarity with which we handle 
them ? Consider the seed dropped into the ground : it swells 
with germinating energy, bursts its integuments, sends up- 
ward a delicate shoot, which grows into a stem, putting forth 
in due season its leaves and flowers, until finally a beautiful 
structure is formed, such as Solomon in all his glory could not 



PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY. 107 

equal, and all the art of mankind cannot imitate. And yet 
all these processes are operations of matter; for it is not 
thought necessary to assume an immaterial or spiritual plant 
which effects its purposes through the agency of the material 
structure which we observe. Surely there are here exhibited 
properties of matter wonderful enough to satisfy any one of 
the powers that may be inherent in it. Are we, then, to be- 
lieve that the highest and most complex development of or- 
ganic structure is not capable of even more wonderful opera- 
tions ? Would you have the human body, which is a micro- 
cosm containing all the forms and powers of matter organized 
in the most delicate and complex manner, to possess lower 
powers than those forms of matter exhibit separately in Na- 
ture ? Trace the gradual development of the nervous system 
through the animal series, from its first germ to its most com- 
plex evolution, and let it be declared at what point it sudden- 
ly loses all its inherent properties as living structure, and be- 
comes the mere mechanical instrument of a spiritual entity. 
In what animal, or in what class of animals, does the imma- 
terial principle abruptly intervene and supersede the agency 
of matter, becoming the entirely distinct cause of a similar, 
though more exalted, order of mental phenomena? To ap- 
peal to the consciousness of every man for the proof of a 
power within him, totally distinct from any function of the 
body, is not admissible as an argument, while it is admitted 
that consciousness can make no observation of the bodily or- 
gan and its functions, and until therefore it be proved that 
matter, even when in the form of the most complex organi- 
zation, is incapable of certain mental functions. Why may it 
not, indeed, be capable of consciousness, seeing that, whether 
it be or not, the mystery is equally incomprehensible to us, 
and must be reckoned equally simple and easy to the Power 
which created matter and its properties ? When, again, we 
are told that every part of the body is in a constant state of 
change, that within a certain period every particle of it is re- 
newed, and yet that amid these changes a man feels that he 



108 THE LIMITS OF 

remains essentially the same, we perceive nothing inconsist- 
ent in the idea of the action of a material organ ; for it is not 
absurd to suppose that in the brain the new series of particles 
take the pattern of those which they replace, as they do in 
other organs and tissues which are continually changing their 
substance yet preserve their identity. Even the scar of a 
wound on the finger is not often effaced, but grows as the 
body grows : why, then, assume the necessity of an imma- 
terial principle to prevent the impression of an idea from be- 
ing lost ? 

The truth is, that men have disputed vaguely and violently 
about matter and motion, and about the impossibility of mat- 
ter affecting an immaterial mind, never having been at the 
pains fco reflect carefully upon the different kinds of matter 
and the corresponding differences of kind in its motions. All 
sorts of matter, diverse as they are, were vaguely matter — 
there was no discrimination made ; and all the manifold and 
special properties of matter were comprised under the gen- 
eral term motion. This was not, nor could it lead to, good; 
for matter really rises in dignity from physical matter in 
which physical properties exist to chemical matter and chem- 
ical forces, and from chemical matter to living matter and its 
modes of force ; and then in the scale of life a continuing as- 
cent leads from the lowest kind of living matter with its force 
or energy, through different kinds of physiological elements 
with their special energies or functions, to the highest kind 
of living matter with its force — viz., nerve-matter and nerve- 
force ; and, lastly, through the different kinds of nerve-cell3 
and their energies to the most exalted agents of mental func- 
tion. Obviously, then, simple ideas derived from observation 
of mechanical phenomena cannot fitly be applied to the ex- 
planation of the functions of that most complex combination 
of elements and energies, physical and chemical, in a small 
space, which we have in living structure ; to speak of me- 
chanical vibration in nerves and nerve-centres is to convey 
false ideas of their extremely delicate and complex energies, 



PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY. 109 

and thus seriously to hinder the formation of more just con- 
ceptions. 

In like manner, much barren discussion has been owing 
to the undiscriminating inclusion of all kinds of mental mani- 
festations under the vague and general term mind ; for there 
are most important differences in the nature and dignity of 
so-called mental phenomena, when they are properly observed 
and analyzed. Those who have not been at the pains to 
follow the order of development of mental phenomena and 
to make themselves acquainted with the different kinds of 
functions that concur to form what we call mental action, 
and who have not studied the differences of matter, are doing 
no better than beating the air when they disclaim against 
materialism. By rightly submitting the understanding to 
facts, it is made evident that, on the one hand, matter rises 
in dignity and function until its energies merge insensibly 
into functions which are described as mental, and, on the 
other hand, that there are gradations of mental function, the 
lowest of which confessedly do not transcend the functions 
of matter. The burden of proving that the Deus ex macMnd 
of a spiritual entity intervenes somewhere, and where it 
intervenes, clearly lies upon those who make the assertion or 
who need the hypothesis. They are not justified in arbitra- 
rily fabricating an hypothesis entirely inconsistent with ex- 
perience of the orderly development of Nature, which even 
postulates a domain of Nature that human senses cannot take 
any cognizance of, and in then calling upon those who reject 
their assumption to disprove it. These have done enough if 
they show that there are no grounds for and no need of the 
hypothesis. 

Here we might properly take leave of the archbishop's 
address, were it not that the looseness of his statements and 
the way in which his understanding is governed by the old 
phrases of philosophical disputes tempt further criticism, and 
make it a duty to expose aspects of the subject of which he 
does not evince the least apprehension. He would, we inia- 



110 THE LIMITS OF 

gine, be hard put to it to support the heavy indictment con- 
tained in the following sentence which he flings off as he 
goes heedlessly forward: " A system which pretends to dis- 
pense with the ideas of God, of immortality, of free agency, 
of causation, and of design, would seem to offer few attrac- 
tions." The question of the value of any system of philosophy 
is not, it may be observed incidentally, whether it is unattrac- 
tive because it dispenses with received notions, still less 
because its adversaries imagine that it must dispense with 
them; but it is whether it possesses that degree of funda- 
mental truth which will avail to enlarge the knowledge and 
to attract ultimately the belief of mankind. History does not 
record that the doctrines of Christianity were found attractive 
by the philosophers of Greece or Rome when they were first 
preached there ; does, indeed, record that Paul preaching on 
Mars' Hill at Athens, the city of intellectual enlightenment, 
and declaring to the inhabitants the unknown God whom 
they ignorantly worshipped, made no impression, but found 
it prudent to depart thence to Corinth, nowise renowned at 
that time as a virtuous city, renowned, indeed, in far other 
wise. "We have not, however, quoted the foregoing sentence 
in order to repudiate popular attractiveness as a criterion of 
truth, but to take occasion to declare the wide difference be- 
tween the modest spirit of scientific inquiry and the confident 
dogmatism of the so-called Positive Philosophy. Science, 
recognizing the measure of what it can impart to be bounded 
by the existing limits of scientific inquiry, makes no proposi- 
tion whatever concerning that which lies beyond these lim- 
its ; equally careful, on the one hand, to avoid a barren 
enunciation in words of what it cannot apprehend in 
thought, and, on the other hand, to refrain from a blind 
denial of possibilities transcending its means of research. A 
calm acquiescence in ignorance until light comes is its atti- 
tude. It must be borne clearly in mind, however, that this 
scrupulous care to abstain from presumptuous assertions does 
not warrant the imposition of any arbitrary barrier to the 



PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY. m 

reach of its powers, but is quite consistent with the convic- 
tion of the possibility of an invasion and subjugation of the 
unknown to a practically unlimited extent, and with the most 
strenuous efforts to lessen its domain. 

The wonder is — and the more it is considered the greater 
it seems — that human intelligence should ever have grown to 
the height either of affirming or of denying the existence of a 
God. Certainly the denial implies, even if the affirmation 
does not also, the assumption of the attributes of a God by 
him who makes it. Let imagination travel unrestrained 
through the immeasurable heavens, past the myriads of orbs 
which, revolving in their appointed paths, constitute our 
solar system, through distances which words cannot express 
nor mind conceive definitely, to other suns and other planet- 
ary systems ; beyond these glimmer in the vast distance the 
lights of more solar systems, whose rays, extinguished in the 
void, never reach our planet : still they are not the end, for 
as thought in its flight leaves them behind, and they vanish 
in remote space, other suns appear, until, as the imagination 
strives to realize their immensity, the heavens seem almost 
an infinite void, so small a space do the scattered clusters of 
planets fill. Then let sober reflection take up the tale, and, 
remembering how small a part of the heavenly hosts our 
solar system is, and how small a part of our solar system 
the earth is, consider how entirely dependent man, and 
beast, and plant, and every living thing are upon the heat 
which this our planet receives from the sun; how vege- 
tation flourishes through its inspiring influence, and the 
vegetation of the past in long-buried forests gives up again 
the heat which ages ago it received from the sun ; how animal 
life is sustained by the life of the vegetable kingdom, and by 
the heat which is received directly from the sun ; and how 
man, as the crown of living things, and his highest mental 
energy, as the crown of- his development, depend on all that 
has gone before him in the evolution of Nature — considering 
all these things, does not living Nature appear but a small 



112 THE LIMITS OF 

and incidental by-play of the sun's energies ? Seems it not 
an unspeakable presumption to affirm that man is the main 
end and purpose of creation ? Is it not appalling to think 
that he should dare to speak of what so far surpasses the 
reach of his feeble senses, and of the power which ordains 
and governs the order of events — impiously to deny the 
existence of a God, or not less impiously to create one in his 
image? The portion of the universe with which man is 
brought into relation by his existing sentiency is but a frag- 
ment, and to measure the possibilities of the infinite unknown 
by the standard of what he knows is very much as if the 
oyster should judge all Nature by the experience gained with- 
in its shell — should deny the existence on earth of a human 
being, because its intelligence cannot conceive his nature or 
recognize his works. Encompassing us and transcending our 
ken is a universe of energies ; how can man, then, the " feeble 
atom of an hour," presume to affirm whose glory the heavens 
declare, whose handiwork the firmament showeth? Certain- 
ly true science does not so dogmatize. 

Bacon, in a well-known and often-quoted passage, has re- 
marked, that u a little philosophy inclineth men's minds to 
Atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about 
to religion; for while the mind of man looketh upon second 
causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them, and go no 
further ; but when it beholdeth the chain of them, confeder- 
ate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and 
Deity." It is not easy to perceive, indeed, how modern sci- 
ence, which makes its inductions concerning natural forces 
from observation of their manifestations, and arrives at 
generalizations of different forces, can, after observation of 
Nature, avoid the generalization of an intelligent mental 
force, linked in harmonious association and essential relations 
with other forces, but leading and constraining them to higher 
aims of evolution. To speak of such evolution as the course 
of Nature is to endow an undefined agency with the proper- 
ties which are commonly assigned to a god, whether it be 



PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY. 113 

called God or not. The nature, aim, and power of this su- 
preme intelligent force, working so far as we know from 
everlasting to everlasting, it is plainly impossible that man, a 
finite and transient part of Nature, should comprehend. To 
suppose him capable of doing so, would be to suppose him 
endowed with the very attributes which, having only in part 
himself, he ascribes in the whole to Deity, 

Whether the low savage has or has not the idea of a God 
is a question which seems hardly to deserve the amount of 
attention which it has received. It is certain that he feels 
himself surrounded and overruled by forces the natures and 
laws of which he is quite ignorant of, and that he is apt to 
interpret them, more or less clearly, as the work of some 
being of like passions with himself, but vastly more powerful, 
whom it is his interest to propitiate. Indeed, it would ap- 
pear, so far as the information of travellers enables us to 
judge, that the idea entertained of God by the savage who 
has any such idea is nearly allied to that which civilized peo- 
ple have or have had of a devil ; for it is the vague dread of 
a being whose delight is in bringing evil upon him rather 
than that of a being who watches over and protects him. 
Being ignorant altogether of the order of Nature, and of the 
fixed laws under which calamities and blessings alike come, 
he frames a dim, vague, and terrible embodiment of the causes 
of those effects which touch him most painfully. Will it be 
believed, then, that the Archbishop of York actually appeals 
to the instinct of the savage to rebuke the alleged atheism 
of science ? Let it be granted, however, that the alleged in- 
stinct of the savage points to a God and not to a devil ruling 
the world, it must in all fairness be confessed that it is a dim, 
undefined, fearful idea — if that can be called an idea which 
form has none — having no relationship to the conception of 
a God which is cherished among civilized people. In like 
manner as the idea of a devil has undergone a remarkable 
development with the growth of intelligence from age to age, 
until in some quarters there is evinced a disposition to im- 



114 THE LIMITS OF 

prove him out of being, so the conception of a God has under- 
gone an important development through the ages, in corre- 
spondence with the development of the human mind. The 
conceptions of God affirmed by different revelations notably 
reflect, and are an index of, the intellectual and moral char- 
acter of the people to whom each revelation has been made, 
and the God of the same religion does unquestionably advance 
with the mental evolution of the people professing it, being 
differently conceived of at different stages of culture. Art, 
in its early infancy, when it is, so to speak, learning its steps, 
endeavors to copy Nature, and, copying it badly, exaggerates 
and caricatures it, whence the savage's crude notion of a God ; 
but the aim and work of the highest art is to produce by 
idealization the illusion of a higher reality, whence a more 
exalted and spiritual conception of Deity. 

Notwithstanding the archbishop's charge of atheism 
against science, there is hardly one, if indeed there be even 
one, eminent scientific inquirer who has denied the existence 
of God, while there is notably more than one who has 
evinced a childlike simplicity of faitb. The utmost claim of 
scientific skepticism is the right to examine the evidence of a 
revelation professing to be Divine, in the same searching way 
as it would examine any other evidence — to endeavor to trace 
the origin and development, and to weigh the value, of re- 
ligious conceptions as of other conceptions. It violates the 
fundamental habit of the scientific mind, the very principle 
of its nature, to demand of it the unquestioning acceptance 
of any form of faith which tradition may hand down as 
divinely revealed. When the followers of a religion appeal, 
as the followers of every religion do, in proof of it, to the 
testimony of miraculous events contrary to the experience 
of the present order of Nature, there is a scientific fact not 
contrary to experience of the order of Nature which they 
overlook, but which it is incumbent to bear in mind, viz. : 
That eager and enthusiastic disciples sometimes have visions 
and dream dreams, and that they are apt innocently to ima- 



PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIBY. 115 

gine or purposely to invent extraordinary or supernatural 
events worthy the imagined importance of the subject, and 
answering the burning zeal of their faith. The calm observer 
and sincere interpreter of Nature cannot set capricious or 
arbitrary bounds to his inquiries at any point where another 
may assert that he ought to do so ; he cannot choose but 
claim and maintain the right to search and try what any 
man, Jew or Gentile, Mussulman or Bramin, has declared 
sacred, and to see if it be true. And, if it be not true to him, 
what matters it how true it be ? The theologian tells him 
that the limits of philosophical inquiry are where faith be- 
gins, but he is concerned to find out where faith does begin, 
and to examine what sort of evidence the evidence of things 
unseen is. And if this right of free inquiry be denied him, 
then is denied him the right to doubt what any visionary, or 
fanatic, or madman, or impostor, may choose to proclaim as a 
revelation from the spiritual world. 

Toward the close of his lecture the archbishop, breaking 
out into peroration, becomes violently contemptuous of the 
philosopher who, a with his sensations sorted and tied up 
and labelled to the utmost, might," he thinks, "chance to 
find himself the most odious and ridiculous being in all the 
multiform creation. A creature so glib, so wise, so full of 
discourse, sitting in the midst of creation with all its mystery 
and wonder, and persuading you that he is the master of its 
secrets, and that there is nothing but what he knows ! " It 
is not very difficult to raise a laugh by drawing a caricature ; 
but it was hardly, perhaps, worthy the lecturer, the subject, 
and the audience, to exhibit on such an occasion an archi- 
episcopal talent for drawing caricatures. As we have al- 
ready intimated, this philosopher, " so glib, so wise, so full 
of discourse," does not profess to know nearly so much of 
the mystery and wonder of creation as the archbishop does. 
There is more flourishing language of the same sort before 
the discourse ends, but it would be unprofitable to transcribe 
or criticise it; and it is only right to the lecturer to say that 



116 THE LIMITS OF 

he is near his conclusion when he works himself up into this 
vituperative and somewhat hysterical ecstasy. The follow- 
ing passage may be quoted, however, as instructive in more 
respects than one : 

." The world offers just now the spectacle, humiliating to us in 
many ways, of millions of people clinging to their old idolatrous reli- 
gions, and refusing to change them even for a higher form ; while in 
Christian Europe thousands of the most cultivated class are beginning 
to consider atheism a permissible or even a desirable thing. The very 
instincts of the savage rebuke us. But just when we seem in danger 
of losing all may come the moment of awakening to the dangers of 
our loss. A world where thought is a secretion of the brain-gland — 
where free will is the dream of a madman that thinks he is an em- 
peror, though naked and in chains — where God is not or at least not 
knowable, such is not the world as we have learned it, on which 
great lives have been lived out, great self-sacrifices dared, great piety 
and devotion have been bent on softening the sin, the ignorance, and 
the misery. It is a world from which the sun is withdrawn, and with 
it all light and life. But this is not our world as it was, not the world 
of our fathers. To live is to think and to will. To think is to see 
the chain of facts in creation, and passing along its golden links to 
find the hand of God at its beginning, as we saw His handiwork in its 
course. And to will is to be able to know good and evil ; and to will 
aright is to submit the will entirely to a will higher than ours. So 
that with God alone can we find true knowledge and true rest, the 
vaunted fruits of philosophy." 

Was ever before such a terrible indictment against Chris- 
tianity drawn by a Christian prelate? Its doctrines have 
now been preached for nearly two thousand years ; they 
have had the aids of vast armies, of incalculable wealth, of 
the greatest genius and eloquence ; they are embodied in the 
results of conquests, in the sublimest works of art, in some 
of the noblest specimens of oratory, in the very organization 
of modern society ; thousands upon thousands have died 
martyrs to their faith in them, and thousands more have been 
made martyrs for want of faith in them ; they have been 
carried to the darkest places of the earth by the vehicles of 
commerce, have been proclaimed by the messengers and 



PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY. ifj 

backed by the moral power of a higher civilization; they 
are almost identified with the spirit and results of modern 
scientific progress : all these advantages they have had, 
and yet the archbishop can do no more than point to the 
-spectacle of millions of people clinging to their old idola- 
trous religions, and to thousands of the most cultivated class 
in Christian Europe who are beginning to consider atheism a 
permissible or even a desirable thing ! Whether it be really 
true that so many of the cultivated class in Europe are 
gravitating toward atheism we cannot say ; but, if the allega- 
tion be true, it may well be doubted whether an appeal to 
the instincts of the savage who persists in clinging to his 
idolatry will avail to convince them of their error. It is not 
very consistent on the archbishop's part to make such an ap- 
peal, who in another paragraph of his lecture emphatically 
enjoins on philosophy not to banish God, freedom, duty, and 
immortality from the field of its inquiries, adjuring it solemnly 
never to consent to abandon these highest subjects of study. 
Another comment on the passage above quoted which sug- 
gests itself is that men have undergone great self-sacrifices, 
sufferings, and death, for a bad cause with as firm and cheer- 
ful a resolution as good men have for the best cause ; to die 
for a faith is no proof whatever of the truth of it, nor by 
any means always the best service which a man may render it. 
Atheism counts its martyrs as well as Christianity. Jordano 
Bruno, the friend of Sir Philip Sidney, was condemned for 
atheism, sentenced to death, and, refusing to recant, burned 
at the stake. Vanini, who suffered death as an atheist, 
might have been pardoned the moment before his execution 
if he would have retracted his doctrines; but he chose to be 
burned to ashes rather than retract. To these might be 
added others who have gone through much persecution and 
grievous suffering for a cause which the Archbishop of York 
would count the worst for which a man could suffer. How 
many Christians of one sect have undergone lingering tor- 
tures and cruel deaths at the hands of Christians of another 



118 THE LIMITS OF 

sect for the sake of small and non-essential points of doc- 
trine in which only they differed — for points at issue so mi- 
nute as to " be scarcely visible to the nicest theological eye ! " 
Christianity has sometimes been a terrible war-cry, and it 
must be confessed that Christians have been good persecu- 
tors. When the passions of men have worked a faith into 
enthusiasm, they will suffer and die, and inflict suffering and 
death, for any cause, good or bad. The appeal to martyr- 
dom of professors is therefore of small worth as an argu- 
ment for the truth of their doctrine. Pity 'tis that it is so, 
for, if it were otherwise, if self-sacrifice in a cause would suf- 
fice to establish it, what a noble and powerful argument in 
support of the Christian verities might archbishops and bish- 
ops offer, in these sad times of luxury and unbelief when so 
many are lapsing into atheism ! 

But we must bring to an end these reflections, which are 
some of those that have been suggested by the perusal of the 
archiepiscopal address on the "Limits of Philosophical In- 
quiry.' ' Though heavy charges are laid against modern sci- 
ence, they are made in a thoughtless rather than a bitter 
spirit, while the absence of bigotry and the general candor 
displayed may justify a hope that the author will, on reflec- 
tion, perceive his opinions to require further consideration, 
and his statements to be too indiscriminate and sweeping. 
On the whole there is, we think, less reason to apprehend 
harm to scientific inquiry from this discharge of the arch- 
bishop's feelings, than to apprehend harm to those who are 
obstinately defending the religious position against the attack 
which is thought imminent. For he has used his friends 
badly : he has exposed their entire flank to the enemy ; 
while he would distinctly have philosophy concern itself 
with the highest subjects — God, freedom, and immortality — 
despising a philosophy which forbears to do so, and pointing 
out how miserably it falls short of its highest mission, he 
warns philosophy in the same breath that there is a point at 
which its teaching ends. 



PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY. 119 

"Philosophy, while she is teaching morals and religion, 
will soon come to a point where her teaching tends. . . She 
will send her scholars to seek in revelation and practical 
obedience the higher culture that she can only commence." 

The pity of the matter is, that we are not furnished with 
a word of guidance as to where the hitherto and no farther 
point is. With brave and flourishing words he launches the 
inquirer on a wide waste of waters, but without a rudder to 
guide him, or a compass to steer by. Is he to go on so long 
as what he discovers is in conformity with the Gospel accord- 
ing to the Thirty-nine Articles, but furl-to his sails, cease his 
exertions, and go down on his knees, the moment his discov- 
eries clash with the faith according to the Thirty-nine Arti- 
/ cles ? What guarantee have we that he will be content to 
do so ? In withholding the Scriptures from the people, and 
shutting off philosophy entirely from the things that belong 
to faith, the Church of Rome occupies a strong and almost 
impregnable position ; for, if there be no reading there will 
be no inquiry, and if there be no inquiry there will be no 
doubt, and if there be no doubt there will be no disbelief. 
But the union of philosophical inquiry and religious faith is 
not a natural union of kinds ; and it is difficult to see how 
the product of it can be much different from the hybrid 
products of other unnatural unions of different kinds — can 
be other than sterile, when it is not monstrous. 



II— THE THEORY OF VITALITY.* 

It has been the custom of certain disciples of the so- 
called Positive Philosophy to repudiate as extravagant the 
well-known opinion of Protagoras, that man was the meas- 
ure of the universe. If the proposition be understood of 
man as he is known to himself by the revelations of self- 
consciousness, there is unquestionably great reason for its 
rejection ; but, if it be applied to him as an objective study, 
it is manifest that modern science is tending to prove it by 
no means so absurd as it has been sometimes deemed. Day 
by day, indeed, is it becoming more and more clear that, as 
Sir T. Browne has it, man " parallels Nature in the cosmog- 
raphy of himself;" that, in truth, "we are that bold and 
adventurous piece of Nature which he that studies wisely 
learns in a compendium what others labor at in a divided 
piece and endless volume.'' t The u heaven-descended yv&6i 
ceavrSp " acquires new value as a maxim inculcating on man 
the objective study of himself. 

The earliest cultivators of Grecian philosophy — Thales, 
Anaximenes, and Diogenes of Apollonia — did seek objec- 
tively for the tyxh or first principle of things common to 
man and the rest of Nature. This primitive kind of induc- 
tion was soon, however, abandoned for the easier and speed- 
ier deduction from the subjective facts of consciousness ; so 
that, as the German philosopher is said to have done with 

* British and Foreign Medico- Chir. Bevieiu, No. 64, 1863. 
t Religio Medici. 



THE THEORY OF VITALITY. 121 

the elephant, man constructed the laws of an external world 
out of the depths of his own consciousness. Because an in- 
dividual was conscious of certain passions which influenced 
his conduct, he fancied that natural bodies were affected in 
their relations to one another by like passions. Hence the 
phenomena of Nature were explained by sympathies, antip- 
athies, loves, discords : oil had an antipathy to water ; 
Nature abhorred a vacuum ; Love was the creative force 
which produced development and harmony ; Hate, the de- 
structive force which produced disorder and discord. The 
method was only a phase of the anthropomorphism by which 
the Dryad was placed in the tree, the Naiad in the fountain, 
and the gods of mankind were created by man. 

The result of such a method was inevitable. "When in a 
language there is but one word for two or three different 
meanings, as happens in all languages before the cultivation 
of science — when, for example, the loadstone is said to attract 
iron, the earth to attract heavy bodies, the plant to attract 
moisture, and one mind to attract another, without further 
differentiation — there necessarily is an ambiguity about 
words; disputes thereupon arise, and the unavoidable issue 
is sophistry and sophists. That was a result which the in- 
genious and active mind of Greece soon reached. In scien- 
tific nomenclature it is constantly becoming necessary to dis- 
card words which are in common use, because of their vague- 
ness and want of precision; for as it is with life objectively, 
and as it is with cognition or life subjectively, so must it be 
with the language in which the phenomena are expressed. 
A scientific nomenclature must rightly present a progress 
from the general to the special, must reflect in its increasing 
specialization the increased specialization of human adapta- 
tion to external Nature. As might be expected, Plato and 
Aristotle both recognized the evil in Greece, and both tried 
to check it. The metaphysics, analytics, etc., of the latter 
have been described as a dictionary of general terms, " the 
process throughout being first to discover and establish defi- 
6 



122 THE THEORY 

nite meanings, and then to appropriate to each a several 
word." * But it is in vain to attempt to establish words ex- 
cept as living outgrowths of actual facts in Nature. The 
method was a mistaken one ; there was not an intending of 
the mind to the realities of external Nature, and knowledge 
was barren, wanting those "fruits and invented works" 
which Bacon pronounces to be, as it were, " sponsors and 
sureties for the truth of philosophy." 

Much the same thing happened in the earlier part of the 
Middle Ages. The mysticism and sophistry which then pre- 
vailed, the endless and unprofitable but learned and ingenious 
disputes concerning empty propositions and words which had 
no definite meanings, might be said to represent the wasted 
efforts and unavailing strength of a blind giant. But as the 
infant, moved by an internal impulse, at first strives uncon- 
sciously for its mother's breast and draws its nourishment 
therefrom, gradually awakening thereby to a consciousness 
of the mother who supplies it, so the human mind for a time 
gathered unconsciously the material of its knowledge from 
Nature, until it was gradually awakened to a full conscious- 
ness of the fruitful bosom which was supplying it. The al- 
chemist, moved by his avarice and the instinct of a unity in 
Nature, and the astrologer, moved by the feeling of a destiny 
governing human actions, both lighted on treasures which, 
though not then appreciated, were yet not lost ; for of astrol- 
ogy came astronomy, and from alchemy, in the fulness of 
time, was born chemistry. In Eoger Bacon, who successfully 
interrogated Nature in the spirit of the inductive method, we 

* Coleridge's Literary Correspondence. It is for this attempt, praise- 
worthy surely as far as it went, that Bacon is unduly severe upon Aristotle 
in some parts. Thus : " And herein I cannot a little marvel at the philoso- 
pher Aristotle that did proceed in such a spirit of difference and contradic- 
tion toward all antiquity, undertaking not only to form new words of sci- 
ence at pleasure, but to confound and extinguish all ancient wisdom." (De 
Augmentis Scientiarum.) And again: " Aristotle, as though he had been 
of the race of the Ottomans, thought he could not reign except the first thing 
he did he killed all his brethren." (Ibid.) 



OF VITALITY. 123 

see the human mind instinctively and, as it were, uncon- 
sciously striving after the true source of knowledge ; while in 
the Chancellor Bacon, who established the principles and 
systematized the rules of the inductive philosophy, we see 
it awakened to a clear apprehension of the necessity of doing 
with design and method that which in an imperfect manner 
it had for some time been blindly aiming at. But as it is 
with the infant, so it is with humanity : action preceded con- 
sciousness, and Bacon was the efflux of a spirit which pre- 
vailed, and not the creator of it. 

The method of investigation has accordingly been com- 
pletely reversed. Instead of beginning with himself and 
passing thence to external Nature, man begins with Nature 
and ends with himself; he is the complex to which his in- 
vestigations ascend step by step through progressively in- 
creasing complications of the simple. Not only so, but the 
necessity of studying himself objectively is fully recognized ; 
it is not the subjective feeling of heat or cold in a feverish 
patient, but the figure at which the thermometer stands, that 
is now appealed to as the trustworthy index of the real tem- 
perature. The development of the senses, or, in other words, 
the increased specialty of human adaptation to external Na- 
ture, has been, as the progress of science proves, the founda- 
tion of intellectual advance ; the understanding has been de- 
veloped through the senses, and has in turn constructed in- 
struments for extending the action of the senses.* The tele- 
scope has merely been a means for enabling the eye to pene- 
trate into distant space, and to observe the motions of worlds 
which the unaided vision would never have revealed ; by the 
microscope the minute structure of tissues and the history of 

* A great desideratum is a history of such development of the senses : 
" Wir besitzen gar treffliche Werke tiber die Geschichte von Schlachten 
und Staatsformen, genaue Tagebiicher von Kdnigen und fleissige Verzeich- 
nisse von den SchOpfungen der Dichter. Aber den wichtigsten Beitrag zu 
einer Bildungsgeschichte des Menschen in der eingreifendsten Bedeutung 
des Wortes hat noch Niemand geliefert. Uns fehlt eine Entwickelungs- 
geschichte der Sinne."— Moleschott, Kreislauf des Lebens. 



124 THE THEORY 

the little world of the organic cell have been made known ; 
the balance has demonstrated the indestructibility of matter, 
and has supplied to science the exactness of the numerical 
method ; and, in the electric stream, there has been found a 
means of investigating nerve-action, like that which there is 
in polarized light for ascertaining the internal condition of 
crystallized bodies. Who would have ventured to predict 
some time since that it would ever be possible to measure 
the speed at which an impulse of the will travels along the 
nerves ? * And who will venture to say that it will not at a 
future time be possible to measure the velocity with which 
one idea calls up another in the brain ? Biology must plainly 
of necessity be the last and most difficult study, for it pre- 
supposes the other sciences as vital force supposes inferior 
forces ; but it is the evident tendency of advancing knowl- 
edge to bring life more and more within the compass of sci- 
entific investigation. And if it be sometimes made a reproach 
to science, as it was by Comte, that it has not discovered the 
laws of life, it may well rest calm under the censure, point- 

* Such an eminent physiologist as Mtiller could venture to predict the 
impossibility thereof. In his Physiology he says : " Wir werden auch wohl 
nie die Mittel gewinnen die Geschwindigkeit der Nervenwirkung zu ermit- 
teln da uus die Vergleich ungeheurer Entfernung feint aus der die Schnel- 
ligkeit einer dem Nerven in dieser Hinsicht analogen Wirkung des Licht 
berechnet werden kann." With which compare Helmholtz: "Ueber die 
Methoden kleinste Zeittheilchen zu messen," etc. 1850. 

As long as physiologists considered it necessary to refer the operations 
of the nerves to the extension of an imponderable or psychical principle, it 
might well appear incredible that the rapidity of the stream should be 
measurable within the limits of the animal body. At present we know, 
from the investigations of Du Bois-Reymond on the electro-motor proper- 
ties of nerves, that the activity by which the propagation of a stimulus is 
accomplished is closely connected with an altered arrangement of their ma- 
terial molecules— perhaps even essentially determined by them. Accord- 
ingly, the process of conduction in nerves may belong to the series of con- 
tinuous molecular operations of ponderable bodies, in which, for example, 
the conduction of sound in the air, or the combustion in a tube filled with 
an explosive mixture, is to be reckoned. It is not surprising therefore, " 
he adds, " that the speed of conduction should be very moderate. 1 ' (Ueber 
die Methoden, etc.) 



OF VITALITY. 125 

ing to the history of the earth to show that Nature, having 
done all else, required a long period hefore it accomplished 
the evolution of life. 

In spite, then, of a desire on the part of some persons to 
separate biology from the other sciences, and, notwithstand- 
ing the alarm occasionally displayed with regard to the dig- 
nity of vitality, it is the certain tendency of advancing 
knowledge to bring a science of life into close and indissolu- 
ble relations with other sciences, and thus to establish in 
cognition, or to reflect in consciousness, the unity which 
exists in Nature. When, in ancient times, life was assigned 
to the stars, the air, the water, a sort of unity was recog- 
nized, but recognized only by explaining Nature from a very 
imperfect knowledge of man ; now the task is to explain man 
on the basis of an increasing knowledge of Nature, and in 
that way to demonstrate the unity of the whole. What must 
be the result? Nothing less, indeed, than the reconciliation 
of the ideal and the real, the identification of subjective and 
objective. As life is a condition in which an intimate corre- 
lation exists between the individual and Nature, it is evident 
that, while Plato dealt only with ideas of the mind, his sys- 
tem must remain comparatively unprofitable ; but it is evi- 
dent also that, since we have learned to discover the laws or 
ideas in Nature of which ideas in the mind are correlates, it 
becomes possible to find in Nature an interpretation of 
Plato's true ideas.* Once for all, it may perhaps be taken 
for granted that the ideas of genius never can be meaningless ; 
for its mental life is a reflection in consciousness of the un- 
conscious life of Nature. How excellently has this been ex- 
emplified in him who embodied in poetical form the scientific 
spirit of this age ! It was the great characteristic of Goethe, 

* " Bat it is manifest that Plato, in his opinion of ideas as one that had 
a wit of elevation situate as upon a cliff, did descry ' that forms were the 
true object of knowledge,' but lost the real fruit of his opinion by consider- 
ing of forms as absolutely abstracted from matter, and not confined and de- 
termined by matter ; and so turning his opinion on theology, wherewith all 
his natural philosophy is infected. "—jDe Aug. Sclent. 



126 ■ THE THEORY 

as Lavater justly said of him, to give a poetical form to the 
real ; lie proved, in fact, that science, in place of rendering 
poetry impossible, opened a field for the highest poetry. His 
romance of the Elective Affinities (Wahlverwandschaften) 
starts from the chemical affinities of elements, and applies 
such affinities to human beings, therein exactly reversing the 
old method, which, starting from the phenomena of self-con- 
sciousness, applied the passions of the human mind to the 
phenomena of external Mature. Of Goethe it may be justly 
said, that in him the ideal and the real were happily blended ; 
that he embodied the scientific spirit of the age, and yet was 
in some respects an advance upon it ; that he was a prophecy 
of that which must be a course of development of the human 
mind if it be destined to develop. 

The foregoing general sketch of the course and tendency 
of knowledge is fully justified by the present aspect of sci- 
ence. "When Nature was first examined objectively the dif- 
ferences in matter appeared manifold, and its modes of energy 
or activity — that is, its forces — appeared many also. On a 
more careful use of the senses, however — in fact, by the ap- 
plication of the delicate balance to the products of combus- 
tion — it became evident that one form of matter only disap- 
peared to reappear in another form ; that it never perished, 
but only changed. Elementary matter thus passes upward 
into chemical and organic compounds, and then downward 
from organic to chemical, and from chemical compounds to 
its elementary condition. Out of dust man is formed by an 
upward transformation of matter, and to dust he returns by 
a retrograde metamorphosis thereof. Corresponding with 
the changes in the form of matter are changes in its modes 
of energy or its forces ; to different combinations and ar- 
rangements of molecules correspond different modes of en- 
ergy. Force therefore is eternal, like matter, and passes 
through a corresponding cycle of transformations. The cor- 
relation and conservation of forces, which have always been 
more or less clearly recognized as necessities of human 



OF VITALITY. 127 

thought, are now accepted as scientific axioms, and are daily 
receiving experimental demonstration.* 

Though it may seem difficult to avoid the conclusion that 
there is fundamentally but one natural force which manifests 
itself under different modes, yet such a supposition at present 
transcends the domain of science. As a matter of fact we are 
compelled, in order to form a satisfactory conception of mat- 
ter and its forces, to regard it under a twofold aspect. In 
all our conceptions we imply a sort of dualism of power in 
every body, though we are very apt to forget it in our gen- 
eralizations. The hinges of gravitation, for example, keep 
worlds in their orbits by opposing a centrifugal force which 
would otherwise drive them afloat into space. The smaller 
hinges of molecular cohesion hold together the infinitely 
smaller bodies which we call molecules of matter, in opposi- 
tion to a repulsive force, which, on the application of a little 
heat, may drive them off into space, and in volatile sub- 
stances does so drive them off without heat. It is the same 
with liquids ; their diffusion power is similar in character to 
the volatility of solids; while "colloids " are volatile, " crys- 
talloids " are comparatively "fixed." There is a relation of 
molecules to one another which we are compelled to repre- 
sent in conception as the result of a force of repulsion or 
tension. And as some sensible image is necessary for the 
mind in order to the clearness of a conception of the invisi- 
ble, physics assumes between the ponderable molecules of a 
body certain ethereal particles which are in a state of sta- 

* Epicurus, Democritus, Aristotle, all upheld the eternity of matter; 
the quotations from Lucretius and Persius on that subject are well known, 
but the following passage from the Be Augmentis is not so common : " All 
things change, but nothing is lost. This is an axiom in physics, and holds 
in natural theology; for as the sum of matter neither diminishes nor in- 
creases, so it is equally the work of Omnipotence to create or to annihilate." 
Other passages of like import occur in Bacon's writings. And the Bra- 
minical doctrine is as follows : "The ignorant assert that the universe in 
the beginning did not exist in its author, and that it was created out of 
nothing. O ye, whose hearts are pure, how could something come out of 
nothing ?" 



128 THE THEORY 

tionary oscillation, the degree of temperature of the body 
being supposed to depend upon the intensity of the active 
force of these imponderable intermolecular particles. If the 
body be suddenly and greatly compressed, these motions are 
communicated to the imponderable ether outside the body, 
and tension force thus becomes free force in manifest radia- 
tion of heat. " What is heat in us," very justly said Locke, 
" is in the heated body nothing but motion.'' When heat is 
withdrawn from matter — that is, when the tension force be- 
comes free, its molecules get nearer to one another — their 
cohesion is greater ; thus vapors become liquids and liquids 
become solids. 

It seems probable that the necessity of regarding matter 
under this twofold aspect of attraction and repulsion is owing 
to man's inability, as being himself a part of Nature, to form 
a conception of Nature as a whole. He must necessarily re- 
gard things in relation to himself ; for as he exists only in 
relation to Nature, and as every phase of consciousness is an 
expression of this relation, it is plain that one of the elements 
of the relation cannot free itself, and from an independent 
point of view watch unconcernedly things as they really are. 
Thus, though we speak of passivity and activity, they are 
really not different kinds of action, but different relations of 
the same kind of action. Whatever be the cause, and how- 
ever doubtful the philosophical validity of the distinction, 
we are compelled to regard matter in this twofold relation. 
One aspect of the relation we describe as passive, statical, 
cohesion, or, to use the generic term, attraction; the other 
is active, dynamical, tension, or, to use the generic term, re- 
pulsion. Attraction plus repulsion of molecules constitutes 
our conception of matter ; and, in observation of its modes 
of energy, attraction is recognized in gravitation, cohesion, 
magnetism, affinity, love, while repulsion is found in the cen- 
trifugal force, in heat, in electricity, in antipathy, and hate. 

It is in rising to the department of chemical compounds 
that attraction is found under a new and special phase as 



OF VITALITY. 129 

chemical affinity. But, when the chemical union of two mol- 
ecules into a single one takes place, a diminution of the ten- 
sion force surrounding each molecule must occur, and, accord- 
ing to the law of the conservation of force, an equivalent of 
another force must be set free. This happens in the produc- 
tion of heat and electricity ; for, as Faraday has shown, 
chemical action cannot take place without the development 
of electricity. The amount of force liberated in a simple 
chemical combination will be the equivalent of the tension 
force lost. When one atom of carbon combines with one atom 
of oxygen, a definite quantity of tension force surrounding each 
molecule disappears, and a definite quantity of heat is accord- 
ingly produced. When two molecules separate in chemical de- 
composition, they necessarily make passive or latent so much 
active force; so much heat becomes so much tension force. 
But furthermore, in a chemical decomposition we have the 
resolution of that very intense and special force, chemical 
affinity itself; so that the force set free will, one would sup- 
pose, far exceed that which becomes latent as tension force 
around the molecules. We know not why two molecules 
should chemically combine ; we accept as a fundamental law 
of their nature this high, special, and powerful form of at- 
traction; but we do know that, when chemical decomposition 
takes place, a little chemical force must be resolved into 
a large display of inferior force. It is a fact authenticated 
by Faraday, that one drop of water contains, and may be 
made to evolve, as much electricity as under different modes 
of display would suffice to produce a lightning-flash. The 
decomposition of matter is the resolution of force, and in 
such resolution one equivalent of chemical force will corre- 
spond to several equivalents of inferior force. Thus chemical 
force, though correlated with the physical forces, may be 
said to be of a much higher order than they are. 

In the still higher stage of matter in a state of vitality, 
we meet with chemical combination of a much more complex 
character than occurs in inorganic matter ; attraction appears 



130 THE THEORY 

under its most special and complex form. Matter, which in 
its elementary condition might occupy some space, is so 
blended or combined as to occupy a minimum 01 space ; and 
force, which, under a lower mode, might suffice perhaps to 
illuminate the heavens, is here confined within the small 
compass of an organic cell or of a speck of protoplasm. We 
have to do, however, with organic matter under two forms — 
as dead and as living matter, as displaying energy of its own, 
or as displaying no energy. Dead organic matter has ceased 
to act, and it is now acted upon ; it is at the mercy of the 
forces which surround it, and immediately begin to effect its 
dissolution. Heat hastens decomposition, because in the 
separation of the constituents of organic matter into the 
ultimate inorganic products — carbonic acid, ammonia, and 
water — a certain amount of active force must become latent 
as the tension force of these molecules ; and this force the 
heat supplies. There is also the force of the chemical affinity 
of the oxygen of the air for the oxidizable elements of the 
substance ; and the combination is necessarily attended with 
the production of heat. The heating value of organic matter 
will accordingly increase with the quantity of oxidizable ele- 
ments; but the matter is by no means so simple as it might 
at first sight appear to be. Suppose the atom of carbon with 
which an atom of oxygen combines was previously in com- 
bination with, for example, an atom of hydrogen; and the 
question is, whether the amount of heat produced will be the 
same as though the atom of carbon had been free ? In reality 
it will not ; it must be less, because in the separation of the 
carbon atom and the hydrogen atom so much active force 
must become tension force — that is, so much heat must dis- 
appear or become latent; and that loss of heat will neces- 
sarily counterbalance a part of the heat produced, or the 
decrease of tension force which occurs, through the combi- 
nation of the atom of carbon with the atom of oxygen. It is 
this consideration which appears to invalidate some experi- 
ments made and conclusions come to with regard to animal 
heat. 



OF VITALITY. 131 

But there is another consideration. In this mere burning 
or decomposition of organic matter, or that which represents 
the passive, statical, or attractive phase of vitality, the active 
force which results is due partly to force from without, and 
not solely to the liberation of force latent in the matter. Ex- 
ternal forces have, as it were, been pulling it to pieces. 
What, then, cm the principle of the conservation of force, 
becomes of that intense chemical force which is implied in 
the organic nature of the material, that power which holds 
it together as & specific material differing in properties from 
all kinds of inorganic matter ? Though dead, the chemical 
composition of organic substance is the same as when alive ; 
and its future destiny is entirely dependent on the circum- 
stances in which it may be placed. In the air, it is true, it 
will undergo decomposition into inorganic products ; but, if 
it be surrounded with the conditions of life, if it be exposed 
to the influence of higher forces, by being given as food to 
some animal, it does not go downward, but upward, and 
somehow takes on life again. It is plain what becomes of 
the statical force under the latter circumstances. But, in the 
decomposition of organic matter in the air and the correlative 
resolution of force, it is not so evident what becomes of all 
the force which must be liberated. That it returns to general 
Nature can admit of no doubt; but does it all appear as heat? 
A part of it must necessarily do so, becoming latent as the 
tension force of the molecules of the ultimate products of its 
decomposition, and the rest is liberated under some form or 
other, if not entirely as heat. There is some reason to believe, 
however, that dead organic substance does not always un- 
dergo the extreme retrograde metamorphosis of material and 
of force before being used up again in vital compounds, even 
by the vegetable kingdom. It has been shown that not only 
do pale plants, such as fungi, feed on organic matter, but 
that soluble humus is regularly taken up by the roots of al- 
most all plants. Prof. Le Oonte has shown it to be probable 
that the decomposition of the organic matter supplies the 



132 THE THEORY 

force necessary for raising other matter from a lower to a 
higher stage.* The force necessary for organization is thus 
furnished by the force which results from disorganization ; 
death and destruction are the conditions of life and devel- 
opment. 

When organic matter displays energy — that is, when it 
has life — its relations with its surroundings are different. As 
chemical affinity seems to hold the place of attraction in it, 
and to correspond to gravitation among celestial bodies, 
cohesive force among molecules, and magnetic force among 
polar molecules, so its dynamical or vital action seems to cor- 
respond to the force of repulsion, to the centrifugal force of 
heavenly bodies, the tension force of molecules, and electrical 
repulsion. The display of energy coincides with a molecular 
change in the statical element. "With the function of a gan- 
glionic nerve-cell, for example, a correlative molecular change, 
or "waste," as it is called, necessarily takes place either in 
the nerve-element itself or in what is supplied to it from the 
blood. The substances which are met with in the so-called 
extractives of nerve-tissue afford abundant evidence of a ma- 
terial waste ; for as products of the retrograde metamorphosis 
are found lactic acid in considerable quantities, kreatin, uric 
acid, probably also hypoxanthin, and, representing the fatty 
acids, formic and acetic acid.t And what Du Bois-Keymond 
proved to happen in muscle, Funke has observed to happen 
also with nerve : while the contents of nerve-tubes are neutral 
during rest in the living state, they become acid after death, 
and also after great activity during life. After excessive 
mental exercise, it is well known that phosphates appear in 

* The Correlation of Physical, Chemical, and Yital Force, and the Con- 
servation of Force in Vital Phenomena. By J. Le Conte, Professor of Ge- 
ology and Chemistry in South Carolina College. (American (Journal of 
Science and Arts, No. 28, 1859.) 

t It is interesting to remark how the products of chemical transformation 
resulting from nerve-action agree with the products of decomposition after 
muscular activity, and how the results coincide with what, a priori, might 
have been expected from the great vital activity of nerve-structure. 



OF VITALITY. 133 

the urine in considerable quantities ; and it is only by sup- 
posing an idea to be accompanied by a correlative change in 
the nerve-cells that we can explain the bodily exhaustion 
which is produced by mental labor, and the breaking down 
of the brain under prolonged intellectual efforts. There is 
even at times a sensation of something going on in the brain ; 
and, in insanity, such anomalous feelings are sometimes per- 
sistently complained of. But the change or waste which 
accompanies energy is restored by nutrition during rest, and 
the conditions of future energy are thus established ; nutritive 
attraction steadily repairing the waste of centrifugal function. 
The cell thus, for a time at least, preserves its individuality ; 
and definiteness of energy, with the maintenance of individ- 
uality, is what is connoted by vitality. 

Is the energy displayed by living matter something quite 
special ? In attempting to answer that question, two consid- 
erations should be kept in view. In the first place, an effect 
need not at all resemble in properties its cause ; the qualities 
of a chemical compound are quite different from those of its 
constituents. Such a complex compound as organic matter 
really is may be expected, therefore, to exhibit peculiar prop- 
erties in no way resembling those of its constituent elements 
or those of simple compounds. In the second place, the ar- 
rangement or grouping of the molecules in a substance, inde- 
pendently of its chemical composition, may greatly alter its 
properties : there is a molecular as well as a chemical consti- 
tution of matter. In that condition of bodies which is de- 
scribed as Isomerism, there are atoms alike in number, nature, 
and relative proportion, so grouped as somehow to produce 
compounds having very different chemical properties. Again, 
it has been found that the same matter may exist under two 
very different conditions, and with very different properties— 
as colloidal and as crystalloidal, in a gelatinous or in a crys- 
talline state. And what is the chief difference ? It is that 
the colloidal is a dynamical state of matter, the crystalloidal 
a statical state. The colloid exhibits energy ; its existence is 



134 THE THEORY 

a continued metastasis ; and it may be looked upon, says 
Graham, " as the probable primary source of the force ap- 
pearing in the phenomena of vitality." The distinction be- 
tween the two kinds of matter is, in fact, " that subsisting 
between the material of a mineral and the material of an 
organized mass." And yet minerals may exist in the colloidal 
state ; the hydrated peroxides of the aluminous class, for ex- 
ample, are colloids. Furthermore, the mineral forms of silicic 
acid deposited from water, such as flint, are found to have 
passed during the geological ages from the colloidal into the 
crystalline condition ; and, on the other hand, in the so-called 
blood-crystals of Funke, a soft and gelatinous albuminoid is 
seen to assume a crystalline contour. " Can any facts," asks 
Graham, " more strikingly illustrate the maxim, that in Na- 
ture there are no abrupt transitions, and that distinctions of 
class are never absolute ? " * 

The foregoing considerations render it evident that the 
manifestation of organic energy by matter is not a contrast to 
the kind of energy which is displayed by inorganic matter, 
and so far justify the supposition that it may be a question 
of chemical composition and intimate molecular constitution. 
Vitality would not then be a special principle, but a result, and 
would be explained ultimately by the operation of the so-called 
molecular forces. Coleridge's assertion, that the division of 
substances into living and dead, though psychologically ne- 
cessary, was of doubtful philosophical validity, would receive 
a support which its author could scarce have expected for it. 

Before granting any conclusion, it is desirable to examine 
into that which is generally deemed to constitute the spe- 

* A further characteristic of colloids is their singular inertness in all 
ordinary chemical relations, though they have a compensating activity of 
their own in their penetrability ; they are permeable when in mass, as water 
is, by the more highly diffusive class of substances, but they cut off entirely 
other colloidal substances that may be in solution. It is evident that our 
conception of solid matter must soon undergo considerable modification. 
(On Liquid Diffusion applied to Analysis. By T. Graham, F. R. S. Philo- 
sophical Transactions, 1882.) 



OF VITALITY. 135 

* 

cialty of life. Now, it is certain, when we consider the vast 
range of vitality from the simple life of a molecule or cell to 
the complex life of man, that valid objections may be made 
to any definition of life. If it be wide enough to comprise 
all forms, it will be too vague to have any value ; if narrow 
enough to be exact, it will exclude the most lowly forms. 
The problem is to investigate the conditions of the manifesta- 
tion of life. A great fault in many attempted definitions has 
been the description of life as a resistance or complete con- 
trast to the rest of Nature, which was supposed to be con- 
tinually striving to destroy it. But the elements of organic 
matter are not diiferent from those of inorganic, whence they 
are derived, and to which they return ; and the chemical and 
mechanical forces of these elements cannot be suspended or 
removed within the organism. What is special is the manner 
of composition of the elements : there is a concurrence of 
manifold substances, and they are combined or grouped to- 
gether in a very complex way. Such union or grouping is, 
however, only a further advance upon, and by no means a 
contrast to, the kind of combination which is met with in in- 
organic bodies. Life is not a contrast to non-living Nature, 
but a further development of it. The more knowledge ad- 
vances, the more plainly is it shown that there are physical 
and chemical processes upon which life depends. Heat is 
produced by combustion in the organism as it is in the fire ; 
starch is converted into sugar there, as it is in the chemical 
laboratory ; urea, which is so constant a product of the body's 
chemistry, can be formed artificially by the chemist ; and 
the process of excitation in a nerve, on the closure of a con- 
stant stream, appears to be analogous to the process of elec- 
trolysis in which hydrogen is given off at the negative pole.* 
The peculiarity of life is the complexity of combination in so 
small a space, the intimate operation of many simultaneously - 
acting forces in the microcosm of the organic cell. Knowl- 

* A. von Bezold : TJntersuchungen fiber die electrische Erregung der 
Nerven und Muskeln. Leipzig, 1861. 



136 THE THEORY 

edge cannot pass the life-boundary, because there are not 
at present any means of following the intimate changes which 
take place beyond it ; there is a world there into which the 
senses of man cannot yet enter. But, as each great advance 
of science has followed some invention by which the opera- 
tion of the senses has been extended, there can be little 
doubt that the important step toward a true science of life 
will be made with the discovery of a means of tracing the 
delicate processes of protoplasmic activity. Microscopic phys- 
ics and microscopic chemistry, nay, physics and chemistry 
of a delicacy beyond the reach of the powers of the highest 
microscope, are needed. So that it may well be that this gen- 
eration and generations to come will have passed to their 
everlasting rest before a discovery of the secret of vital ac- 
tivity is made. 

Before dealing with that which is considered to mark a 
second and great peculiarity of life, namely, its aim or plan, 
it will be well to illustrate the foregoing remarks from the 
phenomena of conscious vitality. It is, in truth, with the low- 
est form of vitality as it is with the lowest form of conscious 
vitality — with the human mind in the earliest stages of its evo- 
lution. A self-conservative impulse moves the most barbarous 
people to regard the operation of the external forces of Nature, 
and to adopt rude means to preserve life and to obtain comfort ; 
the savage avoids the current which would drive his frail ca- 
noe on the hungry breakers, and shelters his hut from the over- 
whelming fury of the storm ; he may be said to war with Na- 
ture for the maintenance of individual power, as the vital 
force of a cell may be said to war with the nature that imme- 
diately surrounds it. But it is obvious that man only struggles 
successfully with the physical forces by recognizing the laws 
of their action, and by accommodating his individual forces to 
physical laws ; it is victory by obedience. By conscious obedi- 
ence to the physical law, he appropriates, as it were, the force 
thereof, in the increase of his own power ; the idea is devel- 
oped in his mind as the correlate of the law or idea in Na- 



OF VITALITY. 137 

ture ; in his mental progress Nature is undergoing develop- 
ment through him. By keeping in mind this analogy of the 
mental force the difficulty will be obviated, which there might 
seem to be in conceiving the organic cell as a result of physi- 
cal and chemical forces, and yet as resisting the action of 
these forces. Every act of so-called resistance on the part 
of the cell to the natural forces is really a phenomenon indi- 
cating the development of them; its life is not a contrast to 
non-living Nature, but a further complication of it. The fun- 
damental law of life is the same for its conscious and uncon- 
scious manifestations ; it is individuation by appropriation. 
And, however necessary it may seem to the individual, as a 
part of a whole looking at the rest, to represent the vital as 
in constant antagonism to the physical, such a conception 
does not faithfully express the condition of the whole regard- 
ed as a whole. A just conception of Nature as one harmoni- 
ous whole is plainly not antagonistic to the spirit of any in- 
vestigations which may tend to prove the dependence of life 
on physical and chemical processes. 

That which is commonly said to constitute the specialty of 
life is the maintenance of a certain definite plan ; and accord- 
ingly Coleridge, following Schelling, defined life as u the 
principle of individuation." Given the different kinds of 
force and of matter, and how, it is asked, is the pattern de- 
termined and worked out? As every individual is in life 
weaving out some pattern " on the roaring loom of time," 
though " what he weaves no weaver knows," so the lowest 
form of vitality manifests a definite energy, and is said to 
accomplish a definite plan. A crystal would go on increasing 
if suitable materials and the conditions of its growth were 
present, " but it has been provided that trees do not grow up 
into heaven." Life works according to an aim, said Aristotle. 
Admitting all this, we are not therefore called upon to admit 
a special contrast to the rest of Nature. Liebig compares the 
living body to a building which is constructed after a definite, 
preordained plan; but it is obvious that exactly in the same 



138 THE THEORY. 

sense might the positive biologist say of the chemical atom, 
that it is constructed and displays energy according to a pre- 
ordained plan; or even of the crystal, that it works out a 
certain pattern, seeing that it cannot overstep the laws of 
its form. The plan is the law of the matter, and the law is not 
something outside the matter, but it is inherent in it. Organic 
matter, like the chemical element, has an activity given to it- 
self which it must display ; the law of causality is true of it 
as of inorganic matter ; and the organic effect, the so-called 
accomplishment of the plan, is the necessary result of a cer- 
tain molecular constitution and certain intimate combinations 
which exist in the organic molecule or cell or monad, or 
whatever else we choose to name the ultimate unit of life. 

The direct denial of a special vital force has been the 
natural reaction against that dogmatism which assumed a vital 
principle that was self-generating, did any thing it liked, and 
was not amenable to investigation. That any force should 
be self-generating in inexhaustible quantity is really an in- 
conceivable supposition. If the axiom, that force, like matter, 
is not capable of annihilation, be accepted, and we find, as 
we do, that organic bodies incorporate, or somehow cause to 
disappear, inorganic matter and force, and thereby themselves 
increase, it is an unavoidable conclusion that the organic 
matter and force must represent the converted inorganic 
matter and force. To suppose that the vital force was self- 
produced would be to suppose a disturbance of the equilib- 
rium of Nature, and it might not then be unreasonable to 
fear lest the earth, by the increase of its repulsion force, 
should break through the hinges of gravitation and float off 
into space, or burst into fragments, as a planet between Mars 
and Jupiter is supposed at one time to have done.* 

* Science, in its view of life, seems to be following the course of develop- 
ment in Humboldt's mind. In his earlier writings he denned vital force as 
the unknown cause which prevents the elements from following their origi- 
nal attractive forces. (Aphorism, ex doct. Phys. Chem.Plant.) " Reflection 
and prolonged study," he says, in his "Aspects of Nature, 1 ' "in the depart- 
ments of physiology and chemistry, have deeply shaken my earlier belief in 



OF VITALITY. 139 

When, however, it is said that a minute portion of living 
matter converts inorganic matter into its own nature, and 
thus develops new organic matter which has the power of 
doing likewise, it is evident that a great and peculiar poten- 
tiality is assumed in the living molecule. "What power is it 
which transforms the matter and force ? Some who have ad- 
vocated the correlation of the vital force with the physical 
forces seem not to have given due attention to this question ; 
they have laid such great stress on the external force as to 
have fallen into an error almost as great as, though the oppo- 
site of, that of the advocates of a self-generating vital force. 
External circumstances are the necessary conditions of in- 
ward activity, but the inward fact is the important condition 
— it is the determining condition, and, so far as we know 
yet, it can only be derived from a like living mother struct- 
ure. Nevertheless, even in that inherited potentiality there 
is not a contrast to that which happens in the rest of Nature. 
When heat is converted into electricity, or any force into 
another, the change is not self-determined ; the determining 
force lies in the molecules of the matter, in the so-called 
statical force, that which Aristotle in his division of causes 
names the material cause. And if it be< objected that a little 
life is able to do such a great deal, the answer is that a like 
thing happens in fermentation. When a certain organic sub- 
stance makes the inorganic matter in contact with it become 
organic, it may be that it does so by a kind of infection or 
fermentation by which the molecular relations of its smallest 
particles are transferred to the particles of the inorganic just 
as in the inorganic world forces pass from matter to matter. 

But there are further considerations. Admitting that the 
vital transforming matter is at first derived from vital struct- 

peculiar so-called vital force." And again : " The difficulty of satisfactorily 
referring the vital phenomena of organism to physical and chemical laws 
depends chiefly (and almost in the same manner as the prediction of mete- 
orological processes in the atmosphere) on the complication of the phenom- 
ena, and on the great number of the simultaneously- acting forces, as well as 
the conditions of their activity. 1 ' 



140 THE THEORY 

ure, it is evident that the external force and matter trans- 
formed does in turn become transforming force — that is, vital. 
And if that takes place after the vital process lias once com- 
menced, is it, it may be asked, extravagant to suppose that a 
similar transformation might at some period have commenced 
the process, and may even now be doing so ? The fact that in 
growth and development life is continually increasing, from a 
transformation of physical and chemical forces, is after all in 
favor of the presumption that it may at first have so origi- 
nated. And the advocate of this view may turn upon his 
opponent, and demand of him how he, with a due regard to 
the axiom that force is not self-generating, and to the fact 
that living matter does increase from the. size of a little cell 
to the magnitude of a human body, accounts for the continual 
production of transforming power? A definite quantity only 
could have been derived from the mother structure, and that 
must have been exhausted at an early period of growth. The 
obvious refuge of the vitalist is to the facts that it is impossi- 
ble now to evolve life artificially out of any combination of 
physical and chemical forces, and that such a transformation 
is never witnessed save under the conditions of vitality. 

Thus the argument stands. Meanwhile, those who do 
believe in the origination of life from non-living matter hope 
to succeed in artificially producing the upward transforma- 
tion, and may say reasonably enough that it is not to be ex- 
pected that such transformation should now take place as a 
regular process in Nature, except under conditions of vitality. 
Such a supposition is as unnecessary as it would be to assume 
that the savage must continue to rub together his sticks, after 
he has obtained the spark, in order to make the fire burn. 
"What only is necessary is that the spark of fire, or the spark 
of life, once evolved, should be placed under suitable condi- 
tions, and it will then go on increasing. The minutest portion 
of living matter really now contains implicitly, as it were in a 
microcosm, the complexity of chemical and physical combina- 
tions and the conditions which were necessary for the first 



OF VITALITY. 141 

production of life in the macrocosm, and it supplies these as 
the conditions of further vital transformations. In fact, Na- 
ture, having accomplished a result, does not need on each fu- 
ture occasion to go through the preliminary steps hy which 
the result was first arrived at. And in this relation it is very 
interesting to observe how much use is made of the force 
supplied by the destruction of certain organic matter in rais- 
ing other matter to a higher stage. It is supposed, for ex- 
ample, that urea is partly produced by the oxidation of an 
excess of so-called albuminous matters in the blood, without 
these having entered into the formation of tissue ; and the 
force thus supplied in the retrograde metamorphosis will be 
available, and probably is used, for the exaltation of other 
elements. 

It needs but little consideration to see that the living cell 
cannot supply all the force which is used in increasing and 
advancing life — in the multiplication and transformation of 
cells; heat and other external conditions are necessary, as 
being, so to speak, material for transformation. It is a mis- 
take, however, to say, as some have said, that heat and ex- 
ternal conditions determine the rate of growth. The rate of 
germination, for example, certainly varies according to exter- 
nal conditions, but the limits of variation are fixed by the 
inherent properties of the structure. The seeds of a begonia 
taken from the same pod will, as Mr. Paget has pointed out, 
germinate, some in a day, some at the end of a year, and 
some at various intermediate times, even when they are all 
placed under the same external conditions. And the same 
author has pointed out other indications of self-dependent 
time-rates in the lower organisms. There are, in fact, inter- 
nal as well as external conditions of growth, and the former 
are the more important, for they are really the determining 
conditions. It is with the organic cell and its conditions as 
it is with the individual and his circumstances ; the latter may 
greatly modify character, and are necessary for development, 
but the essential fact, which determines the limit of the modi- 



142 THE THEORY 

fying power of circumstances, is the nature implanted in the 
individual. 

It is easy to perceive how impossible it is, in the present 
state of science, to come to any positive conclusion with re- 
gard to the nature of the vital force. All that can be said is, 
that advancing knowledge more and more clearly proves the 
dependence of life on physical and chemical processes, and 
tends to show that vital action does not contrast with the 
kind of action exhibited by inorganic Nature. Living matter 
displays, in fact, the energy of colloidal and the plan of crys- 
talloidal matter. Y/hen vital force undergoes resolution into 
inferior force, simultaneously with the decomposition of sub- 
stance, it is into heat, chemical force, and electricity, that we 
find it, as it were, unfolded; it is a natural conjecture, there- 
fore, that the conditions of the artificial production of vitality 
must be a high and complex chemistry to represent the stat- 
ical correlative, and some mode of repulsion force, as heat 
or electricity, or both, to represent the dynamical correla- 
tive. It is certainly extremely unphilosophical in the present 
condition of knowledge to refuse to accept vitality as a 
special mode of manifestation of force ; the special character 
of its phenomena demand that, whatever its real nature may 
be, vital force should for the present be received as a distinct 
force on the same terms as chemical force or electrical force. 
The facts of observation, as well as a priori considerations, 
unquestionably demand also that it should be regarded as 
subject to the laws of the correlation and conservation of 
force. 

As, then, vital force is plainly by far the highest force in 
dignity, a small quantity of it will correspond in value to a 
much greater quantity of an inferior force ; one equivalent 
of vital force, in fact, will correspond to many equivalents 
of the lower forces. An immense amount of force is re- 
quired to raise matter from its elementary state to that con- 
dition in which it is described as organic ; and the upward 
transformation evidently only takes place through the inter- 



OF VITALITY. 143 

mediate action of chemical force. But vital force surpasses 
chemical force apparently in as great a degree as chemical 
force surpasses physical force. How great, then, must be its 
mechanical equivalent! Who can measure the power of a 
great idea? Armies fight in vain against it, and nations 
yield to its sway. What wonder that life was the last and 
highest development of Nature, and that it was produced 
only after the inferior forces had been long in existence ! 
What ground, furthermore, it might be asked, have we for 
supposing that it is destined to be the last development of 
force ? Is it not possible that a still higher manifestation of 
force than that which we call vital may ultimately result 
from the complexity of forces and conditions which are now 
present on earth? The hypothesis of Laplace was, that in 
primeval times a large quantity of nebulous matter was 
spread through space. This nebulous matter was through 
gravitation aggregated into solid masses. Immense heat must 
have been thus produced, and this heat might then produce 
light, and develop electricity as it does now when acting on 
the thermo-electric plates. Electricity might appear again 
as heat or as light, or as chemical force, as it does in the de- 
composing cell of a voltaic battery. The correlation of these 
forces we are able to trace now, and it is not difficult to con- 
ceive how they mutually excited and affected one another in 
the primeval times when the earth was, as we are told, 
without form and void. But there was a time when no life 
existed on the earth. So that as we can now obtain one 
force from another up to the point where life begins, when 
we are at fault, similarly considerable time elapsed in Nature 
before vital force followed on the physical and chemical 
forces. Science may, then, claim that in its difficulty and 
delay it only reflects a corresponding difficulty in Nature. 

But there are other important considerations with regard 
to vitality. It does not follow, because we recognize a special 
vital manifestation, that there is but one kind thereof; it is in 
reality necessary to admit different degrees, if not different 



144 THE THEORY 

kinds, of vitality. As with organic matter so with organic 
force, we trace an advance from the most simple and general 
to the most complex and special. The tissue of the simple 
protozoon is uniform and exhibits no trace of structure ; its 
active relations are equally simple. In the ascending scale 
of life continuous differentiation of tissue corresponds with 
increasing specialty and complexity of relation with the ex- 
ternal, until in man we observe the highest example of a 
unity of organism proceeding from manifold varieties of ele- 
ments, and of unity of action from the coordination of many 
forces. And as it is with the animal kingdom, so it is with the 
elementary structures which form it ; there is a scale of dignity, 
a hierarchy of tissues ; the lowest appear first, and are neces- 
sary steps for the evolution of the highest. All the force of 
Nature could not develop a nerve-cell directly out of inor- 
ganic matter; and the cell of the Protococcus nivalis, or the 
molecules of the Amoeba, could not, under any possible cir- 
cumstances, energize as nerve-force. Between the vitality 
of thought and the vitality of the fungus there is scarcely a 
comparison possible ; the former is dependent upon the widest 
and most complex, and at the same time the most intense and 
special relations with external Nature, while the latter exhibits 
only a few general and comparatively simple relations there- 
with. Between the relations of a nerve-cell and an epidermic 
cell with their surroundings, there is as much difference as 
there is between the relations of a Bhizopod and those of a 
Cephalopod with external Nature. And the relations of a 
nerve-cell with its surroundings are, it must be remembered, 
dependent on the maintenance of the relations of all the in- 
ferior elements of the body which intervene in the descending 
scale between it and the inorganic. 

Whatever, then, may be the fact in animal development, 
it is certain that transformation of species takes place in the 
structural elements. "When a tissue takes material from the 
blood, it does not merely aggregate, but it assimilates it — 
that is, it makes it of the same kind with itself. In develop- 



OF VITALITY. 145 

ment, a higher tissue constantly proceeds from a lower one, 
and demands the lower one as a necessary antecedent to its 
production ; it has thus, as external conditions, not only 
those which are general, but the intimate and special influ- 
ences of the tissue which is before it in the order of existence. 
In the latter are supplied the special and essential conditions 
for the exaltation and transpeciation of force and material. 
But all exaltation of force is, as it were, a concentration of 
it ; one equivalent of the higher force corresponds to many 
equivalents of the inferior force which has been transformed. 
Hence it is that the power of reproducing tissues or parts in 
animals is diminished much more by development than by 
growth ; and the law which describes the reparative power 
in each species of animal as being in an inverse ratio to its 
position in the scale of life, though not strictly proved, is yet 
true as a general proposition. 

If, now, the degree of dignity of an element represents a 
corresponding degree of vitality, it is obviously right to speak 
of the life of the blood, without any design of placing its life 
on the same level with that of nerve. In the decomposition 
of material and the correlative resolution of force which take 
place w^hen the blood-cell returns to the inorganic state, there 
will be much less force liberated than when a nerve-cell un- 
dergoes the retrograde metamorphosis. As a great expendi- 
ture of force is needed to raise matter from the inorganic to 
the organic state, so a further greater expenditure is required 
to raise matter from a low organic to its highest organic con- 
dition. The nerve-cell is, so to say, the highest parasite 
which thus sucks up the life of the blood ; and, if the process 
of its decomposition were accurately observed, it would be 
found that all the force which had been consumed by it in its 
upward transformation was given back to Nature in its down- 
ward metamorphosis. 

The retrograde metamorphosis of organic elements is con- 
stantly taking place as a part of the history of life. In the 
function of nerve-cell, a nerve-force is liberated which excites 



146 THE THEORY 

muscular force, and is ultimately given back to external Na- 
ture as motion ; the coincident " waste " of substance is re- 
ceived into the blood, and ultimately also passes back to 
Nature. It is probable, however, that this a waste " does 
not pass always directly out of the body, but that it may be 
first used as the nutriment of some lower element. Thus, as 
there seemed reason to believe that, in the economy of Na- 
ture, animal matter did not undergo the extreme retrograde 
metamorphosis into inorganic matter before being used as food 
by vegetables, so in the animal body the higher elements do not 
appear at once to undergo the extreme retrograde metamor- 
phosis, but are first used as the nutriment of lower organic 
element. How admirably does Nature thus economize in the 
body! Just as on a larger scale the carbonic acid exhaled 
by animals is taken up by vegetables, and a poison thus re- 
moved from the atmosphere in which the animal lives, so by 
one organic element of the body the blood is purified from 
the waste matter of a higher element which would be poison- 
ous to it. 

The parts impaired by activity, as all parts must be, are 
repaired during rest in a condition of health. And it is 
very interesting to observe, as Mr. Paget has pointed out, 
that the organic processes of repair in each tissue are ad- 
justed to a certain time-rate, which is variable according to, 
but is not determined by, external conditions. The time-rate 
is determined by the implanted properties, and "for each 
unit of nutrition might be reckoned a unit of time." The 
periodicities of organic life appear to be prominent instances 
of the law ; and the rhythmic motions of the heart, or the 
motions of cilia, are, Mr. Paget supposes, due "to a method 
of nutrition in which the acting parts are, at certain peri- 
ods, raised with time-regulated progress to a state of instabil- 
ity of composition from which they then decline, and in their 
decline may change their shape and move with a definite velo- 
city, or (as nervous centres) may discharge nerve-force." * In 

* On the Chronometry of Life. By J. Paget, F. R. S. (Croonian Lec- 
ture before the Royal Society, 1857.) 



OF VITALITY. 147 

this recognition cf the chronometry of organic processes, 
there is unquestionably great promise for the future ; for it 
is plain that the observance of time in the motions of organic 
molecules is as certain and universal, if not as exact, as that 
in the motions of heavenly bodies. Each organic process 
has its definite time-rate ; and each cell has its appointed pe- 
riod of life different for different kinds of cells. The exer- 
cise of its energy is the accomplishment of the life-task of the 
gland-cell of the stomach, and its existence ends therewith — it 
discharges its duty with its life ; but it is not so with other 
cells. It is not known, for example, how soon the blood-cell and 
other cells die. The blood-cell may be ephemeral, and after 
the manufacture of its material straightway perish, supplying 
in the products of its decomposition material for the coloring 
matters of the bile ; or it may accomplish its function more 
than once, and live therefore for some time. Certain facts 
do, indeed, point to a short duration, as, for example, the de- 
struction of the nucleus in the blood-cell, the analogy of the 
cells of the stomach and milk-glands, and of the sebaceous 
and spermatic cells, and the great production of blood-cells ; 
but nothing positive is known, and the subject is one which 
awaits, and ought to receive, careful attention. 

Such, then, is the general process of life physiologically 
regarded. But there is nothing special in disease. Although 
the destructive cancerous mass seems at first sight to admit 
of no sort of comparison with the beneficial formation of a 
developing organ, yet the production is governed by laws of 
organic growth and activity. No new forces nor new laws 
appear in the organism under the circumstances which are de- 
scribed as disease. u 'Tis as natural to die as to be born," says 
Sir T. Browne ; and, if we choose to accept the doctrine of final 
cause, we must acknowledge that the disease which leads to 
death is as natural, as much in the purpose of Nature, as the 
physiological processes which constitute health. An indi- 
vidual exists in certain relations with the external, and the 
harmony which results from the maintenance of these rela- 



148 THE THEOKY 

tions is health, while a disturbance of them, whether from a 
cause in the organism or in the external circumstances, or 
partly in one and partly in the other, is discord or disease. 
The phenomena of morbid action may therefore, when prop- 
erly regarded, be serviceable as experiments illustrating the 
character and relations of vital action. 

As each cell has its appointed period of life, and each 
species of cell its natural degree of life, and as there are 
many cells and many kinds of cells in the human body, it is 
evident that disease will be more easily initiated in it than in 
an organism with less differentiation of tissue, and less com- 
plexity of structure. For the life of the organism is the sum 
of the life of its individual parts, and superiority of vitality 
signifies more numerous, special, and complex relations with 
the external. In the lowest organisms, where there is a 
similarity of structure, one part is independent of another, 
and dependent only on the maintenance of certain general 
and simple relations with the external ; there is, therefore, 
comparatively little liability to disturbance.* When the parts 
are, however, unlike, and there is a definite subordination of 
them, so that the well-being of the highest structure is de- 
pendent on the well-being of all the structures which inter- 
vene in the descending scale between it and inorganic ISTature, 
there is plainly abundant room for disturbance. As in the 
state, so in the organism, the vitality of the government flows 
from, and rests upon, the well-being of individuals. 

"When, from some of the many disturbing causes which 
initiate disease, a particular elementary constituent of the 
body is prevented from rising to the dignity of its specific 
constitution and energy, there will, if the disturbing cause 

* Goethe, after saying that every thing living is a collection of living, 
self-dependent beings, adds: "Je unvolkommner das GeschSpf ist, desto 
mehr sind diese Theile einander gleich oder ahnlich, und desto mehr gleichen 
sie dem Ganzen. Je volkommner das GeschOpf wird, desto unahnlicher 
werden die Theile einander. Je ahnlicher die Theile einander sind, desto 
weniger sind sie einander snbordinirt. Die Subordination der Theile deutet 
auf ein volkommneres Geschopf." 



OF VITALITY. 149 

has not been so serious as to destroy the life of the part, be a 
production of an element of a lower kind with a lower en- 
ergy ; and that is a diseased product. It is as if the substance 
of a polype were produced among the higher physiological 
elements of the human body, and went on increasing there 
without regard to relations with surrounding elements of 
tissue. There may be a production of foreign substance in 
larger quantity than that which should rightly be formed of 
the natural tissue, and a greater display of force, but both 
structure and energy are of a lower order. What is gained 
in quantity is lost in quality, and the vitality is intrinsically 
less. 

Inflammation in a part is really the result of a degenera- 
tion of its vitality. When a wound heals by the " first inten- 
tion/' there is direct adhesion of its surfaces, and no inflam- 
mation, for the natural vitality of the part is maintained, and 
effects the repair. When slight inflammation occurs, the vi- 
tality of the part has undergone a certain degeneration, and 
material of an inferior order to the proper element of the part 
is produced ; this substance binds the surfaces together, and 
it may in process of time, on the complete subsidence of in- 
flammation, and under the favorable conditions of surround- 
ing healthy tissue life, even rise to the condition of the proper 
structure. But the lymph does not appear to be thrown out 
with any special beneficial design ; it is the simple result of 
a deterioration of energy, is only a less degree of a positive 
evil. When greater inflammation takes place, or when the 
natural vitality of the part is feeble, there is a greater degen- 
eration, and material of a still lower kind, which is not even 
orgauizable under any circumstances, is produced. Pus is 
poured out, and ceases to appear with the restoration of the 
proper vitality of the tissue. If the inflammation is still 
greater, the degeneration passes into actual destruction of 
life, and mortification ensues. When John Hunter, therefore, 
speaks, as he does, of Nature calling up the vital powers to 
produce suppuration, his words convey a false notion of what 



150 THE THEORY 

really happens. The injury has so damaged the parts that 
the vital action cannot rise to its specific elevation ; an in- 
ferior kind of action is alone possible, which is really disease, 
and only so far beneficial as it proves that the life of the part 
has not been killed outright. As might be expected, there- 
fore, it is in exhausting diseases that inflammation most com- 
monly and easily occurs. How incorrect, then, is it to speak 
of inflammation as if it were a process specially provided for 
restoring the healthy life of parts ! "When adhesive inflamma- 
tion is said to limit the suppuration of an abscess, its occur- 
rence is a result of diminishing mischief, and testifies to a less 
serious degeneration of vital force. How hard it is not to be 
blind when theories or wishes lead us ! When adhesive in- 
flammation fixes a piece of strangulated gut to the side of the 
belly, so as happily to prevent the passage of fecal matter 
into the peritoneal cavity, it is sometimes said to be a wise 
and kindly provision of Nature. "What, then, shall be said 
of inflammation when it glues the gut to a hernial cavity, or 
manufactures a fibrous band which strangles the gut ? Is this 
also a wise and beneficial design ? 

That which is true of the material products of inflamma- 
tion is necessarily true of its force ; the heat, and pain, and 
rigors, the forces as w^ell as the material, testify to a degenera- 
tion of vital force. The sort of stormy rage and demonstra- 
tive activity which characterize inflammation, though unques- 
tionably an exhibition of force, are not really an increased 
display of the proper vital force. The latter has undergone 
a transformation from the quiet, self-contained activity of 
development into the unrestrained dissipation of a lower ac- 
tivity ; and, as regards the latter, it might be said that sev- 
eral monads of its matter, or volumes of its force, are equiva- 
lent only to one monad of matter or one volume of force of 
the former. Eigors, as the involuntary action of voluntary 
muscle, are a degradation of action witnessing to a molecular 
deterioration of vital conditions. Heat is a physical force 
which must have resulted from the retrograde metamorphosis 



OF VITALITY. 151 

of vital force. The existence of pain, where rightly there 
should be no sensation, testifies to a molecular deterioration 
of statical element and a correlative exhibition of force. The 
increased action of inflammation in a part is, therefore, di- 
minished vital action. Perhaps it might once for all be 
stated, as a law of vital action, that the dignity of the force 
is in an inverse ratio to its volumetrical display. It is indeed 
with organic action as it is with mental action. The emo- 
tional man displays considerable force, and often produces 
great effects in the way of destruction, but his power is vast- 
ly inferior to that of the man who has developed emotion a. 
force into the higher form of will-force, who has coordinated 
the passions into the calm, self-contained activity of definite 
productive aim. Surely creation always testifies to a much 
higher energy than destruction. 

The foregoing considerations unavoidably flow from a 
conception of vitality as correlate with other natural forces, 
and as subject to the law of the conservation of force. They 
obtain additional weight, however, from being in some ac- 
cordance with the important generalizations which one of 
the most philosophical physiologists of the present time has 
made with regard to morbid products. Yirchow has, as is 
well known, referred all morbid structures to physiological 
types, and maintains that there is no new structure produced 
in the organism by disease. The cancer-cell, the pus-cell, 
and all other disease-produced cells, have their patterns in 
the cells of healthy structure. The cells of tubercle corre- 
spond with the corpuscles of the lymphatic glands ; pus and 
colorless blood-corpuscles cannot be distinguished except by 
looking at the place whence they come; the cells of cancer 
in bone u are the immediate descendants of the cells in bone ; " 
and certain colloid tumors have the structure of the umbilical 
cord. "Where a new formation takes place, certain histolo- 
gical elements of the body must generally also cease to exist ; V 
and every kind of new formation is really, therefore, destruc- 
tive, and destroys something of what previously existed. The 



152 THE THEORY 

connective tissue, with its equivalents, he describes as the 
common stock of germs of the body ; from them morbid 
structures proceed by continuous development. " Heterolo- 
gous tissues have physiological types ; and there is no other 
kind of heterology in morbid structures than the abnormal 
manner in which they arise as to place (heterotopia), time 
(heterochronia), and quantity (heterometria)." * 

* The conclusions with regard to vital force, which a con- 
sistent conception of it as a natural force seems to necessi- 
tate, will find extensive application in the various phenomena 
of disease. We have seen that if the resolution of the vital- 
ity of a single nerve-cell into a vitality of a lower kind be 
supposed — into that, for example, of polype substance — it 
would necessarily suffice for the production of a whole 
polype, or perhaps of a multitude of polypes. In other 
words, one nervous unit, monad, or molecule, is the vital 
equivalent of many units, monads, or molecules of polypo 
substance. How idle it is, then, to dispute, as some have 
done, as to whether epilepsy is increased vital action or 
diminished vital action, when there exists no clear conception 
of what is meant by the words ! No one can deny that there 
is great display of force in the convulsions of epilepsy, but is 
it increased vital force ? Is a man in convulsions a strong 
man ? for that is the real question. Does convulsion in a 
paralyzed limb indicate increased vital action of it ? When 
tetanus of a muscle is produced, as Weber showed it might 
be, by putting a loop of thread round its nerve and slowly 
and gradually tightening it, does the violent action of the 
muscle testify to increased vitality ? If it really does, then 
the mechanical tetanomotor of Heidenhain might, properly 
used, suffice for the cure of every paralysis, and effect a com- 
plete renewal of life. 

In speaking of vital action, we may either consider the 
whole organism as individual, or we may consider the cell or 
organic monad as the individual. If we regard the organism 
* Cellular Pathology. 



OF VITALITY. 153 

as individual, then when general convulsions take place in it — 
that is, violent and aimless movements completely withdrawn 
from the control of the will, which should rightly coordinate 
them into definite action — it is simply to use words without 
meaning to say that the vital action of the individual is in- 
creased. There is not, then, individual action ; and the defi- 
nition of vitality is not applicable to the organism as a whole. 
The highest manifestation of individuality is in the conscious- 
ness of man, the so-called unity of the ego ; but, when the 
coordination of forces for a definite end is replaced by the 
convulsions of epilepsy, there is neither subjective nor ob- 
jective unity of action. Instead of that quiet will-force which 
expresses conscious unity, or that unconscious unity of or- 
ganic action which is manifest in sleep, there is the violent 
and incoherent exhibition of inferior force. Increased action 
is the result of a degeneration of the proper vital action. " A 
man in convulsions is not strong, though six men cannot hold 
him." 

Like considerations apply when the single cell is regarded 
as individual. In virtue of a certain chemical constitution 
and a certain definite arrangement of molecules, a cell ex- 
hibits energy as nerve-force. That special mode of energy is 
the definite result of a certain coordination of chemical com- 
binations and molecular relations ; and these are connoted in 
the individuality of the cell. "When, however, in place of 
the definite process of statical attraction (nutrition) and dy- 
namical repulsion (energy), there takes place a large demon- 
strative display of force — as general epileptic convulsions, 
being the sum of the action of the individual cells, prove 
there must — it is impossible to pronounce such force as of 
the same rank or kind as the proper energy of the cell. It is 
an inferior kind of power, and the certain indication of a de- 
generation of the statical correlative. It is the duty of a cell, 
so to speak, as of an individual, to live in certain relations 
with its surroundings — It is, indeed, its essence as an individ- 
ual cell of specific character ; and, when it is not so living, it 



154 THE THEORY 

is really degenerating, losing its nature or kind, passing more 
or less quickly toward death. Its action is certainly not in- 
creased functional action. In truth, it would be as just to 
call the extravagant action of madness in an individual occu- 
pying a certain position in a system of government increased 
functional action, and to say that the government was stronger 
for his degenerate action. A state, again, would not he pow- 
erful, would not even exist, if each individual did as his pas- 
sions prompted, altogether regardless of his relations to 
others; and it would certainly be a strange use of language 
to say then that the functional action of that individual was 
increased. 

The phenomena of conscious vitality might be used to 
illustrate the same principles. A passionate man is not 
strong-minded, nor do the ravings of insanity reveal mental 
vigor. A completely-fashioned will is the true mark of a 
strong mind. " A character," said Novalis, " is a completely- 
fashioned will." As in the order of natural development 
there has been an ascent from the physical and chemical 
forces to the aim-working vital force, and thence from the 
lowest vitality to the highest manifestation thereof, so in the 
course of mental development there is a progress through 
sensation, passion, emotion, reason, to the highest phase of 
mental force, a well-fashioned will. The rightly-developed 
mind, like the healthy cell, recognizes its relations to others ; 
self-feeling gives place to or expands into moral feeling, and 
in the will all the phases of consciousness are coordinated 
into calm, just, definite action. Noise and fury surely indi- 
cate weakness ; they are the manifestation of inferior force 
— the tale of an idiot signifying nothing. The strongest force 
is quiet force, and the ravings of insanity, which might not 
unjustly be compared to the convulsions of epilepsy, do not 
evince mental power. 

May we not, then, already perceive, what advancing 
knowledge must ever render more clear, how the conscious 
mind of man blends in unity of development with the un- 



OF VITALITY. 155 

conscious life of Nature ? As the revelation of Nature pro- 
ceeds in the progress of science, the idealism of Plato and 
the realism of Bacon will be found to harmonize as expres- 
sions of the same truths ; the generalizations of Humboldt 
and the poetical intuitions of Goethe may be looked upon as 
but different descriptions of the same facts. Idealism and real- 
ism blend and are extinguished in the intimate harmony be- 
tween the individual and Nature. How great, then, the igno- 
rance which fancies that poetry demands a rude age for its 
successful development ! How little, again, the insight which 
would make of science an ugly anatomy only ! After analysis 
comes synthesis ; and, beyond the practical realization of sci- 
ence in works which add to human comfort, there remains 
the eesthetical embodiment of science. Art has now opening 
before it a field so wide that imagination cannot dare to limit 
it, for science must plainly attain to its highest development 
in the work of the future poet, who shall give to its reality a 
beautiful form. Goethe indicated the path, but he who shall 
accomplish it will be a greater than Goethe.* 

* Perhaps the truest estimate of science, and the most remarkable 
prophecy with regard to it, is to be found in that wonderful tale by Goethe, 
" Das Mahrchen," a tale which has been described, by one who has done 
most toward making Goethe known and understood in England, "as the 
deepest poem of its sort in existence— as the only true prophecy emitted 
for who knows how many centuries.'' ' 



THE END. 



THE PHYSIOLOGY AND PATHOLOGY 

OF 

THE MIMB H 

By HENRY MAUDSLEY, M. IX 

Price 9 cloth, $3.00. 

This is one of those works which mark the beginning of a new era in the 
study of mental science, and at the same time it is conceded on all sides to 
be, in its practical portions, a most reliable guide for the diagnosis, descrip- 
tion, and treatment of insanity. 

"To effect a reconciliation between the Psychology and the Pathology of the 
mind, or rather to construct a basis for both in a common science, is the aim of Dr. 
Maudsley's hook"— London Saturday Review, May 25, 1867. 

" The first chapter is devoted to the consideration of the causes of insanity. It 
would be well, we think, if this chapter were published in a separate form and scat- 
tered broadcast throughout the land. It is so full of sensible reflections and sound 
truths, that their wide dissemination could not but be of benefit to all thinking per- 
sons. In taking leave of Dr. Maudsley's volume, we desire again to express our 
gratification with the result of his labors, and to express the hope that he has not yet 
ceased his studies in the important field which he has selected. Our thanks are also 
due to the American publishers for the very handsome manner in which they have 
reprinted a work which is certain to do credit to a house already noted for its valu- 
able publications. 1 -— <?warter£y Journal of Psychological Medicine and Medical Juris- 
prudence. 

" Then follow chapters on the diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of insanity, 
each characterized by the same bold and brilliant thought, the same charming style 
of composition, and the same sterling sense, that we have found all through. We lay 
down the book with admiration, and we commend it most earnestly to our readers, 
as a work of extraordinary merit and originality— one of those productions that are 
evolved only occasionally in the lapse of years, and that serve to mark actual and 
very decided advances in knowledge and science."— New York Medical Journal, 
January, 1868. 

" This work of Dr. Maudsley's is unquestionably one of the ablest, and most im- 
portant, on the subjects of which it treats, that has ever appeared, and does infinite 
credit to his philosophical acumen and accurate observation. No one has more suc- 
cessfully exhibited the discordant results of metaphysical, physiological, and patho- 
logical studies of the mind, or demonstrated more satisfactorily the uselessness of 
an exclusive method, or the pressing need of combined action, and of a more philo- 
sophical mode of proceeding."— Medical Record, November 15, 1867. 

" In the recital of the causes of insanity, as found in peculiarities of civilization, 
of religion, sex, condition, and particularly in the engrossing pursuit of wealth, this 
calm scientific work has the solemnity of a hundred sermons ; and, after going down 
into this exploration of the mysteries of our being, we shall come up into active life 
again chastened, thoughtful, and feeling, perhaps, as we never felt before, how fear- 
fully and wonderfully we are made.— Evening Gazette. 

" It is long since we read a scientific work of any kind, of which the raison oVetre 
was so thoroughly good and important, or which accomplished so much toward the 
fulfilment of a most arduous and laborious task."— Lancet. 

" Dr. Maudsley's work, which has already become standard, we most urgently 
recommend to the careful study of all those who are interested in the physiology and 
pathology of the brain."— Anthropological Review. 



THE ORIGIN OF CIVILIZATION; 

OR, THE 

PRIMITIVE CONDITION OF MAN. 
By SIR JOHN LUBBOCK, Bart., M. P., F. R. S. 

3SO Pages. Illustrated.. 

This interesting work is the fruit of many years' research 
by an accomplished naturalist, and one well trained in mod- 
ern scientific methods, into the mental, moral, and social con- 
dition of the lowest savage races. The want of a work of 
this kind had long been felt, and, as scientific methods are 
being more and more applied to questions of humanity, there 
has been increasing need of a careful and authentic work de- 
scribing the conditions of those tribes of men who are lowest 
in the scale of development. 

"This interesting work — for it is. intensely so in its aim, scope, and the 
ability of its author — treats of what the scientists denominate anthropology, 
or the natural history of the human species ; the complete science of man, 
body and soul, including sex, temperament, race, civilization, etc." — Provi- 
dence Press. 

"A work which is most comprehensive in its aim, and most admirable in 
its execution. The patience and judgment bestowed on the book are every- 
where apparent ; the mere list of authorities quoted giving evidence of wide 
and impartial reading. The work, indeed, is not only a valuable one on ac- 
count of the opinions it expresses, but it is also most serviceable as a book 
of reference. It offers an able and exhaustive table of a vast array of facts, 
which no single student could well obtain for himself, and it has not been 
made the vehicle for any special pleading on the part of the author." — 
London Athenceum. 

" The book is no cursory and superficial review ; it goes to the very heart 
of the subject, and embodies the results of all the later investigations. It is 
replete with curious and quaint information presented in a compact, luminous, 
and entertaining form." — Albany Evening Journal. 

" The treatment of the subject is eminently practical, dealing more with 
fact than theory, or perhaps it will be more just to say, dealing only with 
theory amply sustained by fact." — Detroit Free Press. 

"This interesting and valuable volume illustrates, to some extent, the 
way in which the modern scientific spirit manages to extract a considerable 
treasure from the chaff and refuse neglected or thrown aside by former in- 
quirers." — London Saturday Review. 

D. APPLETON & CO., Publishers. 



THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, 

By CHARLES DARWIN. 



A new American edition of "The Origin of Species," later than the latest 
English edition, has just been published, with the author's most recent cor- 
rections and additions. 

In the whole history of the progress of knowledge there is no case so re- 
markable of a system of doctrines, at first generally condemned as false and 
absurd, coming into general acceptance in the scientific world in a single 
decade. From the following statements, the reader will infer the estimate 
that is now placed upon the man and his works by the highest authorities. 

" Personally and practically exercised in zoology, in minute anatomy, in 
geology ; a student of geographical distribution, not on maps and in museums 
only, but by long voyages and laborious collection ; having largely advanced 
each of these branches of science, and having spent many years in gathering 
and sifting materials for hi3 present work, the store of accurately-registered 
facts upon which the author of the c Origin of Species' is able to draw at 
will is prodigious." — Prof. T. H. Huxley. 

u Far abler men than myself may confess that they have not that untiring 
patience in accumulating, and that wonderful skill in using, large masses of 
facts of the most varied kind — that wide and accurate physiological knowl- 
edge — that acuteness in devising, that skill in carrying out experiments, and 
that admirable style of composition, at once clear, persuasive, and judicial, 
qualities which, in their harmonious combination, mark out Mr. Darwin as 
the man, perhaps of all men now living, best fitted for the great work he 
has undertaken and accomplished." — Alfred Russell Wallace. 

In Germany these views are rapidly extending. Prof. Giekie, a distin- 
guished British geologist, attended the recent Congress of German Natural- 
ists and Physicians, at Innspruck, in which some eight hundred savants 
were present, and thus writes: 

"What specially struck me was the universal sway which the writings 
of Darwin now exercise over the German mind. You see it on every side, in 
private conversation, in printed papers, in all the many sections into which 
such a meeting as that at Innspruck divides. Darwin's name is often men- 
tioned, and always with the profoundest veneration. But even where no al- 
lusion is specially made to him, nay, even more markedly, where such allusion 
is absent, we see how thoroughly his doctrines have permeated the scientific 
mind, even in those departments of knowledge which might seem at first 
sight to be farthest from natural history. * You are still discussing in Eng- 
land,' said a German friend to me, * whether or not the theory of Darwin can 
be true. We have got a long way beyond that here. His theory is now our 
common starting-point.' And, so far as my experience went, I found it to 
be so." 

X>. ^JPIPILEITOlSr So CO., Fiiblisliers. 



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LAY SEEMOE^, 
ADDRESSES, AND KEYIEWS, 

By THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY. 

Clotli, 12mo. 390 pages. Price, $1.75 

This is the latest and most popular of the works of this in- 
trepid and accomplished English thinker. The American edition 
of the work is the latest, and contains, in addition to the English 
edition, Professor Huxley's recent masterly address on " Spon- 
taneous Generation," delivered before the British Association for 
the Advancement of Science, of which he was president. 

The following is from an able article in the Independent : 

The " Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews " is a book to be read 
by every one who would keep up with the advance of truth— as well by 
those who are hostile as those who are friendly to his conclusions. In 
it, scientific and philosophical topics are handled with consummate abil- 
ity. It is remarkable for purity of style and power of expression. No- 
where, in any modern work, is the advancement of the pursuit of that 
natural knowledge, which is of vital importance to bodily and mental 
well-being, so ably handled. 

Professor Huxley is undoubtedly the representative scientific man of 
the age. His reverence for the right and devotion to truth have estab- 
lished his leadership of modern scientific thought. He leads the beliefs 
and aspirations of the increasingly powerful body of the younger men of 
science. His ability for research is marvellous. There is possible no mors 
equipoise of judgment than that to which he brings the phenomena of 
Nature. Besides, he is not a mere scientist. His is a popularized phi- 
losophy ; social questions have been treated by his pen in a manner most 
masterly. In his popular addresses, embracing the widest range of top- 
ics, he treads on ground with which he seems thoroughly familiar. 

There are those who hold the name of Professor Huxley as synony- 
mous with irreverence and atheism. Plato's was so held, and Galileo's, 
and Descartes's, and Newton's, and Faraday's. There can be no greater 
mistake. No man has greater reverence for the Bible than Huxley. No 
one more acquaintance with the text of Scripture. He believes there is 
definite government of the universe ; that pleasures and pains are distrib- 
uted in accordance with law ; and that the certain proportion of evil 
woven up in the life even of worms will help the man who thinks to bear 
his own share with courage. 

In the estimate of Professor Huxley's future influence upon science, 
his youth and health form a large element. He has just passed his forty- 
fifth year. If God spare his life, truth can hardly fail to be the gainer 
from a mind that is stored with knowledge of the laws of the Creator's 
operations, and that has learned to love all beauty and hate all vileness of 
Nature and art. 



SPENCERS SYSTEM OF PHILOSOPHY. 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION. 

By HERBERT SPENCER. 



This great system of scientific thought, the most original and important men- 
tal undertaking of the age, to which Mr. Spencer has devoted his life, is now well 
advanced, the published volumes being: First Principles, The Principles of Bi- 
ology, two volumes, and The Principles of Psychology, vol. i., which will be 
shortly printed. 

This philosophical system differs from all its predecessors in being solidly 
based on the sciences of observation and induction ; in representing the order 
and course of Nature ; in bringing Nature and man, life, mind, and society, under 
one great law of action ; and in developing a method of thought which may serve 
for practical guidance in dealing with the affairs of life. That Mr. Spencer is the 
man for this great work will be evident from the following statements : 

11 The only complete and systematic statement of the doctrine of Evolution 
with which I am acquainted is that contained in Mr. Herbert Spencer's ' System 
of Philosophy ; ' a work which should be carefully studied by all who desire to 
know whither scientific thought is tending."— T. H. Huxley. 

" Of all our thinkers, he is the one who has formed to himself the largest new 
scheme of a systematic philosophy." — Prof. Masson. 

"If any individual influence is visibly encroaching on Mills in this country, it 
is his." — Ibid. 

"Mr. Spencer is one of the most vigorous as well as boldest thinkers th#t 
English speculation has yet produced." — John Stuart Mill. 
" One of the acutest metaphysicians of modern times."— Ibid. 

" One of our deepest thinkers."— Dr. Joseph D. Hooker. 

It is questionable if any thinker of finer calibre has appeared in our coun- 
try."— George Henry Lewes. 

"He alone, of all British thinkers, has organized a philosophy."— Ibid. 

" He is as keen an analyst as is known in the history of philosophy ; I do not 
except either Aristotle or Kant."— George Ripley. 

"If we were to give our own judgment, we should say that, since Newton, 
there has not in England been a philosopher of more remarkable speculative and 
systematizing talent than (in spite of some errors and some narrowness) Mr. Her- 
bert Spencer."— London Saturday Eeview. 

"We cannot refrain from offering our tribute of respect to one who, whether 
for the extent of his positive knowledge, or for the profundity of his speculative 
insight, has already achieved a name second to none in the whole range of Eng- 
lish philosophy, and whose works will worthily sustain the credit of English 
thought in the present generation."— Westminster Eeview. 



Works of Herbert Spencer published by D. Appleton <£ Co. 
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FIRST PRINCIPLES; 

Z2V TWO FAJtTS: 

t THE UNKNOWABLE. II LAWS OF THE KNOWABLE. 

In one Voltnne. 518 page3. 



14 "Mr. Spencer has earned an eminent and commanding position as a metaphysician, 
ta1 his ability, earnestness, and profundity, are in none of his former volumes so con- 
gpnjnous as in this. There is not a crude thought, a flippant fling, or an irreverent in- 
Bin.iation in this book, notwithstanding that it has something of the character of a 
daring and determined raid upon the old philosophies." — Chicago Journal. 

"This volume, treating of First Principles, like all Mr. Spencer's writings that have 
fallen under our observation, is distinguished for clearness, earnestness, candor, and 
that originality and fearlessness which ever mark the true philosophical spirit. His 
treatment of theological opinions is reverent and respectful, and his suggestions and 
arguments are such as to deserve, as they will compel, the earnest attention of all 
thoughtful students of first truths. Agreeing with Hamilton and Mansel in the gene- 
ral, on the unknowableness of the unconditioned, he nevertheless holds that their being 
is in a form asserted by consciousness." — Christian Advocate. 

tt The literary world has seen but few such authors as Herbert Spencer. There hava 
been metaphysical writers in the same exalted sphere who before him have attempted 
to reduce the laws of nature to a rational system. But in the highest realm of philo- 
sophical investigation he stands head and shoulders above his predecessors ; not perhaps 
purely by force of superior intellect, but partly owing to the greater aid which the 
light of modern science has afforded him in the prosecution of his difficult task."— 
Boston Bulletin. 

" Mr. Spencer is achieving an enviable distinction by his contributions to the conn- 
try's literature ; his system of philosophy is destined to become a work of no small 
renown. Its appearance at this time is an evidence that our people are not all absorbed 
m war and its tragic events."— Ohio State Journal. 

u Mr. Spencer's works will undoubtedly receive in this country the attention they 
E&erit There is a broad liberality of tone throughout which will recommend them to 
thinking, inquiring Americans. Whether, as is asserted, he has established a new sys- 
tem of philosophy, and if so, whether that system is better than all other systems, is 
f «t to be decided ; but that his bold and vigorous thought will add something valuable 
fisd permanent to human knowledge is undeniable." — Utica Herald. 

** Herbert Spencer is the foremost among living thinkers. If less erudite thas 
Hamilton, he is quite as original, and is more comprehensive and catholic than Maxs 
HiV— Universamb. 



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THE CORRELATION AND CONSERVATION 



OF 



FORCES 



SERIES OF EXPOSITIONS BY GROVE, MAYER, HELMHOLTZ, 
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holtz. 

IV. — THE CONNECTION AND EQUIVALENCE 01 
FORCES. By Prof. Liebig. 

V— ON THE CONSERVATION OF FORCE. By D^ 
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71.— ON THE CORRELATION OF PHYSICAL AND VJ 
TAL FORCES. By Dr. Carpenter. 



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HEAT 5 

CONSIDERED AS A MODE OF MOTION, 

Being a Course of Twelve Lectures delivered before the 
Royal Institution of Great Britain. 

BY JOHN TYNDALL, F. E. S., 

PROFESSOR OF NATUEAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE EOYAL rNSTITTTTION— ATTTHOB 09 1331 
"GLACISES OP THE ALPS," ETC. 

With One Hundred Illustrations. 8vo, 480 page3. Price, $2. 



Prom the American Journal of Science.— "With ail the skill which has 
made Faraday the master of experimental science in Great Britain, Professor Tyndall 
enjoys the advantage of a superior general culture, and is thus enabled to set forth hi8 
philosophy with all the graces of eloquence and the finish of superior diction. "With a 
simplicity, and absence of technicalities, which render his explanations lucid to un- 
scientific minds, and at the same time a thoroughness and originality by which he in- 
structs the roost learned, he unfolds all the modern philosophy of heat. His work takes 
rank at once as a classic upon the subject. 

New York Times.— Professor Tyndairs course of lectures on heat is one of the 
most beautiful illustrations of a mode of handling scientific subjects, which is com- 
paratively new, and which promises the best results, both to science and to literature 
generally ; we mean ike treatment of subjects in a style at once profound and popu- 
lar. The title of Professor Tyndairs work indicates the theory of heat held by him, 
and indeed the only one now held by scientific men — it is a mode of motion, 

Boston Journal.— He exhibits the curious and beautiful workings of nature in 
a most delightful manner. Before the reader particles of water lock themselves or fly 
asunder with a movement regulated like a dance. They form themselves into liquid 
flowers with fine serrated petals, or into rosettes of frozen gauze ; they bound upward 
In boiling fountains, or creep slowly onward in stupendous glaciers. Flames burst into 
music and sing, or cease to sing, as the experimenter pleases, and metals paint them- 
selves upon a screen in dazzling hues as the painter touches his canvas. 

New York Tribune. — The most original and important contribution that has 
yet been made to the theory and literature of thermotics. 

Scientific American. — The work is written in a charming style, and is the 
most valuable contribution to scientific literature that b is been published in many 
years. It is the most popular exposition of the dynamical theory of heat that has yet 
appeared. The old material theory of heat may be said to be defunct. 

XiOuisville Democrat. — This is one of the most delightful scientific works we 
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the lecturer before us, and see his brilliant experiments in every stage of their progress. 
The theory is so carefully and thoroughly explained that no one can fail to understand 
It. Such books as these create a love for science. 

Independent. — Professor Tyndairs expositions and experiments are remarkably 
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In terost of a romance, so startling are the descriptions and elucidations. 



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HISTORY 

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EISE AND INFLUENCE 

OF THE BPIKIT OF 

RATIONALISM m EUROPE. 

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HISTORY OF EUROPEAN MORALS, 

From Augustus to Charlemagne. 

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By W. E. H. LECKY, M. A. 

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The Utilitarian School— Objections to the School— Consequence of acting 
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to the General Condition of Society — The Order in which Moral Feelings 
are developed. 

THE PAGAN EMPIRE. 

Stoicism— Growth, of a Gentler and more Cosmopolitan Spirit in Rome- 
Rise of Eclectic Moralists— The People still very corrupt— Causes of the 
Corruption— Effects of Stoicism en the Corruption of Society — Passion for 
Oriental Religions— Neoplatonism. 

THE CONVERSION OF ROME. 

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Hated Pagan Moralists to Christian Influence— Theory which attributes the 
Conversion of the Empire to the Evidence of Miracles — The Persecution the 
Cimrch underwent not of a Nature to crush it — History of the Persecutions. 

FROM CONSTANTINE TO CHARLEMAGNE. 

First Consequence of Christianity, a New Sense of the Sanctity of Hu- 
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Learning — Moral Condition of Western Europe — Growth of a Military and 
Aristocratic Spirit— Consecration of Secular Rank. 

THE POSITION OF WOMEN. 

The Courtesans— Roman Public Opinion much purer — Christian Influ- 
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